Its sad to see the contortions my boyfriend makes to support his purchase of a headphone jack free android, despite his desire for high quality audio (he hates bluetooth with a passion). USB C to 3.5mm adapters are cheap, but break at the drop of a hat. His integrated speaker meanwhile has blown, and makes for terrible calls.
Headphone jacks serve a useful purpose, most phones could still have them without compromising other properties, but its been made fashionable to go without.
fashionable implies people are making a choice. i guess you can say they are, somewhat, but... if you want larger storage and good camera in a portable device while maintaining any investment in a particular ecosystem... you have to do without a jack.
i've stuck with my iphone se and plan to for a while longer, hoping apple will eventually put out another device with headphone jack. or perhaps i can find an android device i like well enough that still has a jack (those seem to be harder to find too)
Reminds me recently when I was out and was asked to use my phone to play some music through one of those external speakers for an event, went to plug the cable in to my phone... Oh that's right, my new Pixel 2 requires a dongle which no one carries around with them.
If he desires high quality audio he should buy a separate DAC/Amp or a dedicated audio player. DACs in cell phones are mediocre at best and you can get better sound (and headphone jack support) elsewhere.
The blog ends with the best and most insightful comment:
And no human’s life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack. But a lot of our lives are just a little worse.
The author also points towards active de-standardisation between Android and iOS:
"if only there was one universal audio port they both could use"
Apple gets an advantage from this with their iron-grip on compatible peripherals, but I don't know why any of the Android manufacturers would follow suit. The ugliness of the impracticality of fashion.
Bluetooth has been better for me 80% of the time and then that last 20% is a huge pain where as AUX is consistently a little bit worse but it never totally lets you down.
I think I can count the number of times that I've managed to get bluetooth to actually work on the fingers of one hand. It's just trash. Give me a wired connection every day of the week, and it better be something universal like USB-A, micro-usb, HDMI or 3.5mm.
I've never plugged my headphones into a jack and had them fail to work (ok, on my old cassette Walkman, I sometimes had to jiggle the plug around to get the headphones to work, but modern devices seem to have solved that problem (through gold plated connectors? I dunno)).
But around once every 8 times I get into my car, I need to turn off/on Bluetooth on my car, my phone, or both to get it to connect. More rarely, I have to reboot my phone. I haven't used a Bluetooth headset with my phone in several years, but I had the same problem then.
So I don't think Bluetooth is that reliable "works every time" standard.
As much as I prefer headphone jacks, I'll readily admit that my $15 BT headphones from Amazon connect every time I turn them on.
Car BT implementations are actually an interesting world in of themselves, I've seen car BTs wreck havok with other BT peripherals attached to a phone. The level of "how?" was truly amazing.
Bluetooth pairing always seems a bit unclear. Do I start the scan on my phone or the device? Cars seem to be particularly bad in making this clear or otherwise don't work reliably per instructions.
If you want a really bad Bluetooth experience, see Acura. Calls can require active "transfer" to Bluetooth devices when you're streaming, and there is otherwise clunkiness and competition for the car's audio system, for instance if you try to use car nav.
And, woe be unto you if you have multiple in-range devices. There's a pretty good chance it'll vomit and you'll end up with mixed pairing profiles that essentially require you to restart the car and/or disable Bluetooth on one device.
Not sure how they managed to get Bluetooth so wrong, but it's a solid contributor to an overall poor infotainment center design.
It’s becauese they are all copy-pasting the sample code middleware. A few minor changes are made, like advertising name and what not, but I’ve seen literal dupes supplied by the same Taiwanese vendor. And like most sample code, the error handling is non-existent.
Yeah Bluetooth almost never works reliably for me. If it isn't connection problems, it's dead batteries. I refuse to buy or use wireless keyboards, mice, microphones, speakers, or headphones.
For audio output (the majority usecase, I'd argue), this didn't matter much. Left and right audio output _always worked_, and in my experience, at least the play/pause button worked fairly universally as well.
I probably wouldn’t have bought AirPods if my phone still had a 1/8” jack, and every time I have had to use wired earphones since have been worse than if I had my AirPods on me. So here’s one human who disagress with the first bit.
But I wouldn't have bought them, and I would have only experienced two sets of crappy $20 bluetooth headphones and stuck by my assumption that bluetooth sucks, and my life wouldn't be any better.
What about the people who sell Bluetooth headphones? I’d think of some of them are doing better? Or what about the people who worked on the AirPods? Or god forbid the people who like AirPods (or other Bluetooth headphones) more than any wired ones?
False dichotomy. The choice is not only between 3.5mm jacks and Bluetooth; there are thousands of models of devices that support and have supported both.
It's unanswerable -- what were the bluetooth headset sellers selling before the iPhone ditched the headphone jack? Maybe they were selling higher margin (but lower cost) wired headphones that had a lot fewer support headaches. Few people call support to ask how to pair their 3.5mm jack with the phone.
The Airbud designers could have designed the same product even if the iPhone still had a headphone jack, so it's hard to say definitively that their life is measurably better now.
As I said above: I would not have purchased AirPods if it weren’t for Apple removing the 1/8” jack and my life is better for having them. You only need one example to counter an absolute statement.
Personally, I detest wired headphones. I find they always get caught on things while I'm wearing them, and because of the neck problems I have that's a big issue for me (and as well as that, they'd always get tangled up in my bag, which was a bit of a hassle).
So I'm personally glad they've removed the headphone jack, because it will help push wireless into the mass market (and bring down prices) at a faster rate than it otherwise would have.
Now of course, there's lots of people who don't find it a positive like I do. My point is not that everyone should find the jack removal great, my point is that it's wrong to claim that it's a disadvantage for everyone.
On a separate note, people like to shit on Apple for that "courage" claim, but even if removing the jack was a bad decision, I think it's fair to call it a courageous one, because they knew well that they'd get a lot of shit for making that decision. Look at what gets said every time the headphone jack issue is brought up on HN.
but that doesn’t really answer the question of “why remove it?” keeping the audio jack does not prevent the use of wireless headphones. and keeping the audio jack does not really pose a problem.
i guess my point is that i don’t see how that follows. if bluetooth headphones are so great compared to wired headphones, then wasn’t that incentive and market already there? in fact, it just shows the truth, in that apple just wants to be able to sell more and more dongles and bluetooth headphones, so they force this onto their users.
You say you don't see how it follows, yet you yourself say it will cause more wireless headphones to be sold. And if it causes Apple to sell more wireless headphones, then it will also cause other manufacturers to sell more wireless headphones. Greater volume of sales will bring down the price of wireless headphones.
> in fact, it just shows the truth, in that apple just wants to be able to sell more and more dongles and bluetooth headphones
The idea that this is simply a cheap cash-grab sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
But even if it's a purely financial decision, so what? Aren't financial considerations behind most things companies do?
If HN is to be believed, most people absolutely hate the fact that the phones don't have headphone jacks. So if people hate it, and won't buy the phones because of it, then how can it also be a cash grab?
> You say you don't see how it follows, yet you yourself say it will cause more wireless headphones to be sold.
no i didn't. i said apple wants to sell more wireless headphones and dongles. removing the audio jack forces users to look at the new shiny airpods, or whatever they're called, and say "i need that". then they need dongles for integration purposes. yet, they didn't need the dongle before and could still buy wireless headphones.
of course it's a cash grab. that is how apple operates. conspiracy theory? the ceo is literally an expert in operations and logistics, probably apple's greatest strength behind their marketing. it can't be any other decision, because like i said, other phone makers are able to integrate it just fine.
"Apple will sell more wireless headphones, but this won't mean they sell more wireless headphones." That's what you're saying.
If people are going to buy more wireless headphones because of these phones, then they're going to buy them from a range of manufacturers -- in fact mostly other manufacturers because the Apple ones are so pricey.
If people are going to buy more wireless headphones because of these phones then the prices will go down. Do you dispute this? Because this is the point that you originally claimed I didn't make.
> i said apple wants to sell more ... dongles.
Do you know that the phones (up until latest models) come with a dongle so there's not going to be a large number of sales of them?
> of course it's a cash grab. that is how apple operates
It's ridiculous to suggest that everything apple does is just a cheap cash grab.
The person I was replying to said "of course it's a cash grab. that is how apple operates". Increases in the prices of their products hardly equates to everything they are doing being a cash grab. Are their privacy, accessibility or environmental (manufacturing processes, packaging choices, etc) measures all, for example, cash grabs?
i just want to remind you that the original discussion that i initiated was to point out that apple has not given any legitimate reason for removing the audio jack. there is simply no need to remove it. creating a thin or water resistant phone is not an explanation since other manufacturers include the audio jack and have no issues with these features.
your argument is that it helps the wireless headphone market. i don’t think it does in a way that actually matters, but even that doesn’t explain why it was removed in the first place. why does apple care about that market outside of their own sales? the real reason why they removed it is to further increase accessory sales and to market themselves as a design leader, which further sells devices. they have created this mystique that they do and others will follow. unfortunately, that is somewhat the case given other dynamics.
the fact of the matter is that there is zero benefit to the consumer of an iphone for having the audio jack removed. there is benefit to apple’s cash flow by removing it. and here we are.
what you originally said was "but that doesn’t really answer the question of “why remove it?”". You're shifting the goal posts by saying "apple has not given any legitimate reason for removing the audio jack. there is simply no need to remove it." I've given a reason for removing it. You don't just get to declare a reason as not "legitimate". You say "the fact of the matter is that there is zero benefit to the consumer of an iphone for having the audio jack removed.", which just ignores the cost benefit, without arguing against that benefit.
Apple has always removed design features that they don't think are where things should head in the future. That's important to do in the longer term. If you consider any single one of the things they've removed from their computers, it might not seem a big deal, but together they are. Removing things they don't see as part of the future helps them to push technology in the direction they think is best. And removing what they see as unnecessary features can save on costs - costs that might be small per unit but large in terms of the sorts of volumes they are dealing with.
Somethings that bothers me about your argument, is that Apple doesn’t support existing highend audio codecs (presumably to avoid paying the licensing fees) and doesn’t include wireless headphones or an adapter for 3.5mm in the box.
Instead they include wired headphones with a proprietary plug.
If you want high quality headphones with an iphone you have to buy some that license a proprietary Apple protocol or chip or settle for lower sound quality generic Bluetooth audio.
> Apple doesn’t support existing highend audio codecs
I am aware this is an issue for some people. At the same time it's not an issue for other people.
> doesn’t include wireless headphones or an adapter for 3.5mm in the box.
Their latest models don't include adapters, their earlier ones without headphone jacks did.
> If you want high quality headphones with an iphone you have to buy some that license a proprietary Apple protocol or chip or settle for lower sound quality generic Bluetooth audio.
The issue with Bluetooth isn't Apple's fault, though.
But if you want high quality headphones then, yes, you have that choice to make. But we need to acknowledge that not everyone has those requirements.
"The idea that this is simply a cheap cash-grab sounds like a conspiracy theory to me."
Conspiracy theories are sometimes true.
In this case, vendor lock-in is Apple's bread and butter, and it doesn't take any mental gymnastics at all to recognize that removing a standard and universal port without any actually good reason fits that pattern remarkably well.
Yes. I have never said or implied that it's suitable for everyone.
This same point applies to the criticisms of a lack of a headphone jack, too: the things those people are concerned about, such as sound quality, aren't an issue for everybody, either.
But that argument is justification works for removing any technology, whether superior or not.
If you allow only one technology, it will be cheaper irrespective of whether the disallowed technology is better or not.
This makes Apple’s decision worse. It’s an admission that wireless audio is an inferior technology, and that the only way for it to succeed is by removing the alternative, ans/or making it significantly worse.
I think wireless headphones are a good thing, so making them cheaper is a good thing. As you can see in my original comment, I'm just saying this is my view, and I know many people see it otherwise.
But that's different to my point, in two ways. 1) I was talking about cost not quality (c.f. "wireless would have gotten better even if"). 2) I wasn't arguing about whether it would get better or not, but the rate at which it happens being changed by removing the jack (c.f. "would have gotten better even if we did not remove the headphone jack.")
I never said that. I said if wireless is the only option in those phones then this will cause more wireless headphones to be sold, and this will cause wireless headphones to become cheaper. (This is clearer if you read the earlier comments in this sub-thread. By the time the discussion got to the comment you were replying to, that context was being assumed).
So what? That's how the history of technology goes. Innovations come along that people didn't want until they were there. The technology creates the demand. Henry Ford said (and I paraphrase) "if I had asked people what they wanted they would have said 'faster horses'".
But people could still ride horses when cars came about and they still can, the transition happened over decades. But this change is happening over a matter of years, the reasons for which are not utilitarian.
I personally feel 'cord getting caught
is the real motivation behind killing the jack. Every time I've dropped my iPhones since the first one came out, it was because the headphone cable got caught on something and yanked the phone out of my hand or pocket. I am unwilling to use bluetooth as the signal cuts out, batteries are always dead and occasional pairing difficulties. When my iPhone SE dies...(my 9th iPhone) I will likely have to switch to an Android.
> I think it's fair to call it a courageous one, because they knew well that they'd get a lot of shit for making that decision.
Doing something you know will be unpopular is not automatically "courageous". Sometimes it's just stupid. I'm sure you can think of plenty of examples.
No, we're mocking the idea that Apple would use "courage" as an excuse for stupidity while also pointing out that they go hand in hand. Yeah, a guy running up to a bear and punching it in the face is "courageous", but it should be no surprise when the bear gets sick of the guy's antics and decides that it's maul o'clock.
In this simile, the consumers are the bear, and Apple is the moron punching it.
What stops it from being courageous isn't that it's stupid, but that "taking a lot of shit" isn't inherently dangerous. Apple's a behemoth with a captive audience, and their past history taught them that they could push I/O changes on their customers with little risk. Little risk = no courage needed.
They've been courageous in the past, and its generally worked out well for them (keyboards?), but no two cases are the same, and the past doesn't determine the future, so it still takes courage. It's still risky. There are plenty of companies that
wouldn't have the courage to do something that is going to, in the short term at least, annoy so many people.
I don't know, I don't think any of those personal reasons invalidates the arguments of the parent. Your mileage on cables may vary, but the removal of an interface that had been understood by laypeople and was universally supported for the last 50 years seems a more important point to me.
It invalidates the quoted bit they endorsed that said "no human's life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack." "No human's life" is a blanket, absolute statement, and it's wrong. Wireless headphones are much more ubiquitous and cheap these days, and a major brand removing headphone jacks is part of the reason for this.
I don't think it's wrong. How has removing the headphone jack made anyone's life better? I can't think of one way.
It's not as if you couldn't use wireless headphones before the headphone jack was removed. Now that the jack is removed, you're forced to use a USB-C dongle (which has its disadvantages) or purchase expensive Bluetooth headphones if you want a decent enough quality / battery life.
> How has removing the headphone jack made anyone's life better?
Ancestor comments of this have explained that.
Removing headphone jack speeds up uptake of wireless headphones, and greater uptake of them makes them cheaper. These are changes that have already happened. This has benefited people who want to use wireless headphones.
Does it really? I haven't noticed any change in price that could be attributed to this and I bought a pair a few weeks ago, so I'm somewhat up to date with the pricing.
Yes. Scale/volume makes things cheaper. And yes, the price has gone down over the last few years. For example, I've seen ones for AU$20 now, which was not the case a few years ago.
1) Prices have noticeably come down since they've been removed. This in itself is not proof, but at the same time, what is your proof that these phones have nothing to do with it?
2) Removing the headphone jack has given greater impetus for manufacturers to produce wireless headphones, and to produce lower-end models. More volume, more competition.
3) Removing the headphone jack has given more impetus for people to purchase wireless headphones. There are definitely people that have bought wireless headphones because of this, who wouldn't have bough them if their phones had a builtin headphone jack.
2 and 3 mean more volume, and that means lower prices.
Also, the argument I've been making is not focused just on now. It's also an argument about things going forward.
3) I agree with this more people have spent alot of money on bluetooth headphones that don't work, how is this a benefit to anyone but the corporations that profit from it?
As you said yourself you can get bluetooth headphones for $20, but you wouldn't because they are shit. We don't need lower prices we need better value headphones, removing the headphone jack has done nothing to help this.
There where cheap and shitty, wired and wireless headphones before they removed the headphone jack, there are cheap and shitty wired and wireless headphones after, the market is not better off and the customers are especially not better off.
Edit-
AirPods are the first decent bluetooth headphones, they are the competition not the lack of a jack. Look at that aliexpress link its not even a competition they are just copying the style and shoving the same shitty gear inside.
The single feature I've seen that provides any actual value is pairing via NFC - but that came before any mention of forcing wirelessness.
Also the value comes from the fact that manual pairing is still shit - I only do it via NFC because I haven't been to date able to do so alternatively.
> Removing headphone jack speeds up uptake of wireless headphones
1) And by doing this we create even more e-waste!
2) I do _not_ want wireless headphones! I almost exclusively use headphones when I am traveling by bus and train. This happens every 2-4 weeks. At the moment I have a cheap pair of wired headphones in my backpack. They need 0 maintenance. if I need them I just use them. They never needs charging and they never will break. If I have to switch to wireless headphones a) I have to start to take care about charging them and b) they will break after 3 years because the battery dies and can not be replaced.
> 1) And by doing this we create even more e-waste!
You could say that about anything new.
> 2) I do _not_ want wireless headphones!
Good for you, no-one is forcing you to use them.
All I have ever done in this comment thread is argue against the idea that removing the headphone jack has zero benefits for anyone. And yet I'm getting piled on by people basically accusing me of trying to force everyone to go wireless.
As if pointing out that some people have different wants from theirs is somehow denying their wants. It's an amazing lack of perspective.
Is it that hard to accept that someone else has a different view from your own, and that them expressing it is not the same as trying to force it upon you?
But no-one was forcing you to use wired headsets before either. There were options for wireless available.
I think the question remains whether making wired headphones harder to use had zero benefits. That's a different question than whether making wireless headphones easier to use had.
You made an economic argument for the former question - but you can't make that argument and say "no one is forcing you" at the same time.
I made an argument about removing the headphone jack, not about making one thing easier or another thing harder. My argument was about a consequence of removing the jack.
I know no one was being forced to use wired headphones before. That has nothing at all to do with an argument about the consequences of removing the jack.
The options that replaces each of those items were superior to the older design.
A wireless headset requires charging, requires pairing, is more expensive, is more likely to break. It's not a superior technology, it's an alternative technology. You don't eliminate options just because alternatives exist.
They're viewed by everyone as superior in hindsight, but anytime anything gets taken away there are vocal voices complaining about how the newer alternatives are inferior in various ways (and technically the newer options are always inferior in certain ways, especially in terms of using them within existing ecosystems and usage patterns).
That is completely untrue. No one got rid of the floppy drive just because new technology existed. They got rid of the floppy drive because it took dozens of floppies to do what one CD could do. It was a genuinely inferior product with regard to its primary function.
In the case of headphones, their primary function is to connect to a device and deliver sound to your ears. Wireless headphones do not do this better than wired headphones. At all. They have a specific use case advantage related to the connection format, but that isn't universally better because it carries drawbacks as well.
I have a hate relationship with wired things too. Irony is that when I use BT ones, I stay sit thinking I can't leave or I will rip the wire from the device.
I think the issue is that BT has always been a catastrophy in terms of ergonomy, today things are better but still a bit hazardous. Maybe a super simple wireless protocol for managing audio streams (and handling multiple sinks) would change that
They are already in the mass market the problem is they suck.
I have tried a bunch of cheap Chinese bluetooth headphones that cost from $20-$60 they all sound like $5 wired headphones have about 2 hours battery life and break after a month.
I have tried bluetooth head phones that where $200 beats by drea they worked as well as the Chinese headphones they just cost 10 times the price.
Removing the headphone jack has forced people to spend a lot of money on shitty headphones, thats what your glad of.
...and the headphone jack was removed several years ago, so what's your point?
What I'm saying is that it's makes the prices go down. That means better quality ones will get cheaper.
The bluetooth headphones I use are fine. I've heard most people say that AirPods are great.
> Removing the headphone jack has forced people to spend a lot of money
How is it forcing anything on anyone? One, you don't have to buy the phone, and two, you can use the supplied lightning-adapter headphones, or use an adaptor.
As a frequent long flight traveler I have range anxiety on my wireless headphones. I like the 3.5mm jack guarantees me one less device or peripheral to worry about, it just works (even if the noise cancellation may stop working when the battery dies, sound still goes through)
Removing the headphone jack doesn't push wireless into the mass market. It was already in the mass market and it was going to be in the mass market regardless of how Apple designed their phones. If you want to use a wireless headset, you always could. Removing the headphone jack didn't give you any sort of advantages as a wireless user, it just removed an option you didn't use.
And no, it's not courageous to do something dumb and getting skewered for being dumb is not evidence of courage.
It has increased the speed of wireless headphones uptake.
You can call it dumb all you like, but whether something is dumb or not is completely separate from whether it is courageous or not.
I'm amazed by people hating something so much that therefore, in their minds, makes it impossible to have other qualities that might have a positive connotation.
False. Samsung devices have had good water resistance ratings while still retaining headphone ports. (In fact some of the older models even managed to do so with removable batteries.)
that’s what apple wants people to believe so they believe it. however, it’s not true. for example, the lg v35 has an audio jack (and a high-end audio dac at that) and yet has the same water resistant rating, ip68, as the iphone xs.
> but I don't know why any of the Android manufacturers would follow suit.
The obvious reason is a decrease in BOM which corresponds directly with an increase (however so slightly per unit) in margin. Apple made it "ok" to whack this functionality, so why wouldn't every manufacturer join in?
The key to the statement is the "a lot of our lives are just a little worse" at the end, which is an argument that doesn't work for floppy drives, serial ports and, arguably, CD drives, as they were phased out well after commonly-used replacements were well into the mainstream.
The use-case for the 3.5mm headphone jack is still well and truly within the mainstream, and will probably stay there for some time as per the comment in the blog:
the right pair of headphones was the pair of headphones in front of you, or in your pocket, or mangled at the bottom of your bag. It didn’t matter.
There's a lot of legacy-weight hanging around in people's houses, bags, and workplaces.
Your point, however, isn't completely lost on me. I still miss CD drives occasionally, having to retrieve an older laptop in order to grab data from a disc I haven't yet bothered to archive to an ISO file. However, removing a CD drive from a laptop feels like a much higher percentage space saver than losing the 3.5mm jack from a smartphone.
Another "courageous" thing that Apple did was release a computer in 1983 without any fans, which was extremely heavy because it had a giant heat sink, and would still overheat constantly.[1]
And yes, this was apparently Steve Job's idea, as he felt that fans were "too noisy and inelegant". I imagine that he felt that fans were holding humanity back, and smugly told people who disagreed that they were clinging to obsolete technology.
It got so bad, that Apple actually advised their customers to physically lift and drop their Apple IIIs to re-seat the chips that had popped out from the excessive heat.[2]
Of course, if today Apple decided that fans were obsolete again, and the latest Macbooks were twice as heavy and still overheated, then it would become the new normal, and it would be hard to find computers that had fans anymore, and we would long for the days when we could just use computers for as long as we wanted without worrying about them overheating. And on the internet, commenters would say that it wasn't a big deal at all, and if you were some sort of power user that wanted to use your laptop for more than a few hours at a time, you should buy a $250 cooling pad for it.
That's awful. Of course the pattern repeats:
Apple deprecates something that shouldn't be deprecated, and offers a barely adequate replacement. Competitors copy Apple and also deprecate the feature, but their replacements are even worse.
The world had mostly moved on from 3.5" floppy drives when apple dropped them, they were mostly used for windows boot disks and to transfer files between machines. Their complete hardware control allowed them to drop the former and their tiny market share meant they didn't have to care much about the later, floppy disks being incompatible between macs and PC's. The G# being a desktop machine also meant that for anyone that really did need a floppy drive an external one was an acceptable option, carting around dongles is not.
The world didn't care about wireless headphones until their wired option was taken away. It's a solution to a problem of their own making.
I don't know about you, but my computer still has 2 serial ports on the back, a 3.5" USB drive, and 100% compatibility with CDs via my CD-RW/DVD-RW optical drive. Who removed these things? Who would have the gall to tell me that my use-case is somehow invalid because I use older, more reliable hardware and methods?
It's not that insightful, since it's obviously false. The fact is that the much-improved water resistance made possible in part by ditching the headphone jack has made a lot of users' lives much better, because they have dunked their iPhones in water and the result has been no damage, as opposed to the expense and inconvenience of replacing their phones.
It would have been more effective if the author didn't cherry-pick only the facts which support his argument.
Apple's own 3.5mm -> lighting dongle is surprising resistant to water (I've spilled coffee on mine and it still works), but I can't find any information of whether the dongle itself is waterproof. I've looked.
Also, Samsung made a phone with a waterproof 3.5mm female port. They weren't the first.
I don’t know much about this, but from a layman’s perspective I completely agree with you. I find it hard to believe that of all the elements making waterproofing harder, the headphone jack was one of the larger concerns.
> And no human’s life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack. But a lot of our lives are just a little worse
Good old shortsightedness at play here. No one looks past this year or years to come when faced with changes. Here's what I think, based on history, is happening here:
# Wires are more bad than good for average consumer:
a. Neglected security based on assumption that since it's not wireless, it's immune to eavesdropping (think side-channel attacks). Wireless puts security upfront and center.
b. Cables get lost, break, are not long enough, are not compatible, damage the connectors, bad cables damage the device, cost extra, etc. Wireless doesn't.
c. Cables are cumbersome. They get tangled, you need to remember to carry them, have backups, etc.
d. Cables have short range.
Apple evidently cares quite a bit about user experience. Wires hurt user experience so they want to get rid of them, one by one. You can't push towards superfast, low power and generally more advanced mobile devices and accessories, if the industry has no reason to do so (because everything works and has for the past 50 years).
It's tiring reading every day how someone is upset because their favorite feature is gone because they can't see past their front door.
Dongles? I'm talking wireless headphones. Dongles to continue using a wired headphone is supposed to be worse experience so you come off it. Think of it as a transition period.
The problem is that all the issues you name are only marginally bad for the average consumer — there isn’t much motivation to move when the problem isn’t that bad for most. And most importantly all the issues you mention were already solvable with Bluetooth.
b. loss and breakage isn't a wired-exclusive problem
c. backups? so long as you bring backup wireless things as well, no worries
d. Fair enough, but long cables are possible, and in regards to a smart phone, most people carry it on their person so it's not generally a problem - although the freedom to roam about the house with your phone on the counter while you're vacuuming is advantageous in those particular scenarios. Pending wireless range.
A. Wireless security doesn't improve if everyone continues using wired accessories
B. So you replace your accessories as many times as their cables?
C. So you have one phone, headphone, etc for each cable you own? The reason people have backups or multiple cables is because of all the other issues: they get lost, cumbersome to carry around, etc
It’s a bit of a cheap statement though. If keeping the headphone jack would have prevented Apple from making the iPhone X, then the argument wouldn’t hold any value.
I would have hated if the XS was thicker, or if it still had bezels.
After saying I'd never get a phone without a headphone jack until Bluetooth codecs improved, I ended up getting a Pixel2XL through "reward points". It's a great phone ... and I've "only" been needed a headphone jack a dozen or so times in the six months I've had it. Not for headphone, but for other audio input or output requirements.
What an absolutely idiotic idea. I've started leaving those stupid dongles everywhere, but even they don't for with everything. Fashion over function, with an eye to more lock-in.
If they had replaced the 3.5mm with another lightning port, I would have upgraded by now. This single port thing is just silly. Same thing with the latest Macbook Pros, the switch to USB-C doesn't bother me, the low number of ports does.
I was looking for this, I think it's crazy there isn't a phone with dual USB-C ports - one top, one bottom. Not only is it a thinner port for audio, but you can use a wired peripheral while charging, or use a charger from the top if it is more convenient.
I guess it's not something enough people would care about, but it seems like at least one company would have done it by now.
An ADC weighs a fraction of a gram, costs next to nothing in volume, and consumes microamperes at most when not being used.
In fact, it may even be integrated on the SoC, meaning it's still present but with nothing to do. Would need to have a look at some teardown photos to be sure.
I'm assuming he really meant 'DAC' rather than 'ADC', referring specifically to the part that drives the headphone jack as opposed to the built-in earpiece transducer. Some people use the terms interchangeably for whatever reason, even though it's not technically correct.
At this point I'd take a MacBook with a lightning jack, because now I have to carry a separate pair of headphones for my iPhone and my Macbook. I'd prefer 3.5mm everywhere, but if you are going to drop it, make it consistent across product lines.
I'm stuck in the two pair camp as well and I cannot for the life of me understand why Apple makes a 3.5mm to lightning adapter but won't make a lightning to 3.5mm adapter. I have a great pair of headphones that use the lightning cable but I travel a lot and my MacBook along with every airplane uses 3.5mm so I can only use them with my phone. It's maddening.
One of the things I feel happens in the tech world is innovation for innovation’s sake. In my opinion, “Real innovation” solves problems. What was the problem Apple was really trying to solve by removing the jack? The only thing I can come up with is to allow a “thinner” design.
In all the previous “radical changes”, they created a “better solution” to a problem. Take the removal of Floppies or CD drives, in both cases, the problem was getting data onto the machine efficiently. In both cases technology moved ahead and created better methods of moving data.
Please correct me if I am wrong here, but I fail to see what problem they really “solved” by removing the audio jack.
My understanding is that the headphone jack actually occupies a lot of space. If you have opened up a phone before, it is evident that all internal space is _very_ well accounted for, so removing a headphone jack is actually a very tangible increase in usable internal space. And it's not just the jack, you need to include a DAC in the device, too!
This means being able to include more/new co-processors, different/better microphone technology, etc, not just thinner.
Only what I've heard from other hardware engineers though, I do not work directly in the space. "Sell headphones," could absolutely be a goal.
So make the phone 0.5mm thicker or so, and you can make the battery thicker and shorter to make room for the headphone jack (with higher capacity than it had before)
I don't know who is pushing for wafer thick phones that are increasingly fragile with shorter battery life.
The earpiece and speaker distort the sound so much it doesn't really matter what DAC you drive them through. ARM microcontrollers tend to have built-in DACs that are probably good enough for that kind of use.
But when you have your high-quality headphones on, you can certainly tell the difference between a $0.10 DAC and a $5 DAC, just as you could tell the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit samples or 22kHz and 44kHz sample rate.
To get good sound quality, you need good DAC and audio amplifier chips and well-balanced circuitry around them. That takes space.
But then there's that one guy on youtube that managed to not only fit a headphone jack into an existing iphone but also a bunch of circuitry needed to switch the audio path.
If a bloke with a little knowhow and a dremel can do a good job at it so can apple.
If nothing else it proves that the jack removal was not done for space-saving or anything other than business reasons.
However whilst I'm prepared to think ill of Apple under pretty much any circumstance - I'm utterly clueless why so many other vendors jumped in (as they don't have Beats to schill).
Still convinced I'm missing something
clutches onto OG Pixel
Removing the audio jack helped make the phone waterproof, which could be pretty vital. The decision is complicated because we're comparing the tangible loss of the audio jack against the intangible gain of a lower prevalence of water damage for iPhones.
How do the internal components/manufacturing process compare between Sony devices and iPhones? I only ask because it seems like you’re an expert in this topic.
They can waterproof the dozen or so connections of the smaller USB-C, but not the three or four from the jack? Somehow Apple can't emulate something Sony and others have done for decades?
So far, life without a headphone jack has been fine. I don't charge my phone while I use my headphones, and I just keep the dongle attached to my wired headphones. Used some USB-C headphones that came in the box today, and they also worked well.
There are real use cases which aren't supported, but it seems like they come from a vocal minority. And I'm not sure we should be solving these use cases with a (largely) single use port that takes up a noticeable amount of space.
Phones used to ship with IR blasters, but that doesn't really happen any more, and if you want that, you get an adapter.
Maybe I'll change my tune if my adapter breaks regularly, but I needed to replace my cheap wired headphones semi-regularly already.
My experience with my last phone, where the audio jack started losing a connection if I bumped the jack, or tried to reposition the wire also makes me look more fondly on the idea of wireless headphones, since I'm aware that the jack is not perfect tech either.
And in any case, there are still manufacturers making phones with headphone jacks, so vote with your wallet! It is sad that phones are these bundles of tech and you can't just order a phone with a headphone jack, but if this is really a deciding feature, people should definitely vote with their wallet here!
> The only thing I can come up with is to allow a “thinner” design.
The thinnest iPhone ever was the 6s, which had a headphone jack so that doesn't hold water.
The only justification that I know that works out is that by removing the headphone jack you do free up a bunch of space inside the phone, which can be used for more electronics or battery.
It's not to save space. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utfbE3_uAMA . There is just plastic sitting in its place and it is possible to add headphone jack, without making it thick.
100% agree with this. Its pretty interesting that I almost never use headphones anymore now because bluetooth headphones require a few things:
1) preplanning/foresight in charging the headphones
2) refer to number 1.
I have 2 really nice pairs of bluetooth headphones, and almost NEVER use them. Guess what pair gets used almost daily? my 15 year old beyerdynamic DT770s. 3.5mm or ¼" plug, closed back. Not really the most accurate, but a nice bass heavy rich sound and plenty loud. they work with gear that is 50 years old and brand new(so long as they include a headphone jack). I have vintage analog synthesizers 80s and 90s samplers to <2 year old digital synths. All work with these headphones.
Apple really really really really really really screwed up here. reverse course immediately.
I am happy to discuss with anyone who downvotes as to why they disagree with me. My comment may be tangental but is completely relevant to the discussion and reinforces points made in the article.
I agree completely. Digital video had advantages. Despite those, analog still makes some sense, if nothing but fewer resources being needed.
Outside some niche uses, digital video really does make general sense. I hear and often agree with analog arguments. I keep analog gear, and in my own hardware projects will stay analog, perhaps also having digital, depending.
But, overall? People largely benefit more from digital video, and with the loss of the CRT, adoption makes sense. Digital only gear makes sense. I have no concerns and can easily use an analog adapter in a pinch.
With audio, it is inverted! A few niche uses benefit, most do not. They are equal or very modest gain at best.
Video gear seems to age out more quickly too. Increases in resolution drive all that, and analog limits do too. Above HDTV 1920x1080, analog has real issues.
Analog audio does not have those dynamics. There is no analog cliff to drive digital gear. Great stuff from the 70's remains entirely relevant. It always will. Ears are just not like eyes.
I will never, ever buy something that only delivers audio digitally.
Well they can go right ahead. It won't really matter to me. If they end up better than me, I just don't buy that stuff. Don't need it it's a big world out there.
That's pretty much a policy. If I pay for it, fine. But I have it in generally useful form. No lock-in. Or I don't buy it.
And I don't mind hacking to get it in general useful form. Easy peasy.
Try the same kind of comment in the apple support forums and you'll see what kind of mentality die hard apple fans have. The amount of "your opinions are wrong because apple is perfect" is staggering.
I went online to get some help with what was revealed to be the infamous touch-ic issues, and I was told off in so many ways ("that's an old model, you should really get the new one", "if you get flexion based damage, you are using your phone wrong", "wow, another bend-gater. Stop bending your damn phone!").
This was after internal apple documents showed that they were aware of flexion damage before the phone was released to market.
There's a few people on HN who seem to have a weirdly emotional affection for the iPhone's lack-of-headphone-jack. One guy argued that it was all worth it because it reduces dust infiltration, another because it makes it more water-resistant. (Yeah.)
I can see why someone who's never used wired earbuds wouldn't care one way or another, but I really don't understand this sort of attachment.
> another because it makes it more water-resistant.
This, at least, doesn't hold at all. My last flip-phone [0] was water-resistant and still had a headphone jack - it just had a rubber cover you had to pull up to reveal it. The charging port was also protected by the same cover.
The thing is we shouldn't have to do this. The beauty of the 3.5 was the fact that you could've gone to pretty much any remote corner of the earth and you probably could've access to one if you lost yours.
Hahaha. That reads straight or as sarcasm. Well done! I’m sure there are a million reasons that the 3.5 plug was holding back the iPhone, but I have yet to see even 1/1,000,000th of them in the iPhone.
While “we” are in the 10% I try to think about the changes in the frame of the “90/10 rule” (also how I consider the impact of features in my applications). Anecdotally, dropping the headphone jack (and similarly adding the Touch Bar) has negatively impacted 0% of non-developers I’ve talked to about both.
If I were a company, I doubt I’d change course immediately unless the larger data set said something significantly in the other direction. As developers are still, even with our more frequent “upgrade” cycle, not the largest piece of the pie.
> Anecdotally, dropping the headphone jack (and similarly adding the Touch Bar) has negatively impacted 0% of non-developers I’ve talked to about both.
How does removing the headphone benefit users? Also how does being a developer affect how one would listen to music on a phone?
Lacking negative impacts doesn’t imply that there’s benefit, my anecdata seems to be mostly neutral.
The only thing that being developer hints at here is often that group is often more techie and either would be on wireless or have very strong opinions about their listening setup. But the same is likely true for audiophiles (likely skewing toward the 3.5mm).
For what it’s worth, I’m not arguing for the jack to be gone - just sharing the reception I’ve seen in my network.
The point about developers is probably fair (I don't think I necessarily agree with it, but we're an insular enough group that it might not be inaccurate).
The headphone jack issue just seems like a solution in search of a problem. No one was complaining about headphone jacks before, so in a very best case scenario there is no positive impact (you already have bluetooth headphones, you don't mind dongles, etc), but in a worst case scenario they made life measurably worse for users (you don't own bluetooth headphones, you don't want to have to deal with dongles, EarPods are super expensive for headphones; all of these are issues which disproportionately affect the less well-off of people who can't afford the headphone upgrades, which techies tend to not be).
> The headphone jack issue just seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Agreed, removing it doesn't seem like it really gained anything. It was neutral at best and likely negative on the average, perhaps my smaller network that has discussed it just isn't negative and decided to not say anything at all.
> Anecdotally, dropping the headphone jack (and similarly adding the Touch Bar) has negatively impacted 0% of non-developers I’ve talked to about both.
Anecdotally, the headphone jack loss negatively impacted 100% of the non-developerd I've talked to about it. Now, I recognize the particular skew to that experience that biases it to a negative impact—most of the people I've talked to about it happened to be ballroom dance instructors or students in a ballroom teacher training program at a studio where the routine was to plug your device in to the sound system via 1/8” plug (neither keeping the adapter permanently on the phone or on the studio sound system was a viable solution for any of them, so it was one more thing to forget, misplace, etc.)
But I suspect your 100% is also skewed. Anecdotal experience usually is.
AirPods require neither of these things. The case is always charging them. You want to use your beyerdynamics? Fine. Your phone came with an adapter for them.
Its not that I "want" to use them. The difference is that I could use the same headphones to record drums, drum machines, guitar, Vox, or even my iPhone. Bluetooth is great! I use it in my car for phone and audio all the time. Wireless headphones are at a fundamental disadvantage in that they have less battery capacity than a phone. Those AirPod thingys you like? great. They don't fit my weird ears. My problem. but ear buds and I don't mix. Sorry, wireless and small are at odds with each other.
Because it's a pain in the ass to have to carry around another fiddly bit of tech gear which should have been completely unnecessary.
Yeah, it's petty. But literally no one benefits from the absence of jack (or at least no user), so why inflict even a petty annoyance on some users with nothing gained for it?
Why couldn’t they build it with a jack? Due to the thickness?
I’m typing this out on my iPhone 6 (which I will keep until it disintegrates because of its headphone jack) and it is plenty thin. I think only Apple themselves are obsessed with thin devices.
Thinness and waterproofing are the two things I've heard that lead to removing the jack.
Neither seems insurmountable, but if you want to try and remove as many obstacles as possible in the search of those two things then the headphone jack is apparently one of the simpler ones.
Speakers, camera lens, physical buttons, charging, and data transfer are the remaining ones I can think of, and many of those have already been replaced in some models.
Exactly, I think there are solutions for more or less everything I listed, or solutions could be found if necessary.
I think the headphone jack is a very practical component of the phone, and miss it regularly, but removing it does remove a few limitations on the designer.
At some point, in perhaps the not too distant future, I wouldn't be surprised if phones had been reduced down to look like not much more than a piece of glass. Maybe even a piece of flexible glass!
That's definitely been the trend for a while now, and things like edge to edge screens and wireless charging move us further in that direction. Thankfully neither of those seem to have necessitated the removal of some other function. There have been other casualties other on this path to simplification, such as the removal of the physical home button, but I don't think any which leave as big a gap as the headphone jack.
Yeah, I mean it's not like they need to allow air to pass to the interior of the phone. All you need is a couple of exposed metal tabs, no different than the USB/lightning port.
Can't be thinness because the thinnest iphone ever is the 6s, which has a headphone jack and it can't be waterproofing because android makers seem to do waterproof phones with jacks just fine some of them even thinner than iphones too.
In my home office, I have it wired to my simple mixer and amp with which two other computers also connect to. And from that split into my speakers and a pair of headset.
All non-digital and no USB involved with other things that can go wrong. I am no Hi-Fi buff, I just like one volume and power button when I need to silence or amp things.
Whilst commuting on the train I also use the headphone jack, even though I also have a Bluetooth headset, but it is limited to two sources which are already used up by my iPad and phone.
I don't want to yet again swear internally whilst standing on a busy tube with 1000 other people with Bluetooth devices, and having to reset the pairing on my iPad/iPhone.
Ps. I have an old phone with a 3.5mm jack, but I never use it. I use audio on my phone only when commuting or walking and then use Bluetooth. But my old iPad and MBP are stationary so I only use 3.5mm devices with them.
Until you want to charge and listen to music at the same time, which I wanted to do on a flight recently. I had to charge up to what I thought was enough and then put the headphones in. Annoying.
My wife also brought Lightning headphones, which didn't work with anything except her phone, leading to her using the cheap airline ear buds for the in flight entertainment system.
I think it might be slightly annoying to have a two-inch-long dongle hanging off your phone at all times, particularly on a brand of phone that's specifically marketed (and purchased) for being sleek and clean-lined.
>Wireless headphones are at a fundamental disadvantage in that they have less battery capacity than a phone.
I’ve been using a pair of beats for over a year now, and have never run out of batteries with them, even on multi-leg long haul flights. I use them constantly, and almost exclusively charge them when I have to go to a meeting, which doesn’t usually happen more than once a day. I used AirPods before then and their battery life was even better.
As someone who also EXCLUSIVELY buys phones with minijacks I'd say that they're definitely losing, considering that the brands that carry them right now seem to only be Samsung (rumored to drop them next year) and LG. Currently I use the oneplus 6 but they dropped it for the 6T so they're out of the race. It's starting to look like the next time I upgrade it'll have to be to LG and that's assuming they stick to it.
Again? Samsung "dropped" the headphone jack once already and then decided to reintroduce it in their current line of phones. At least that is my understanding of their products with the S7/S8 having removed the headphone jack and the S9 once again featuring a headphone jack.
Late, but I ran into "posting too fast", which can be frustrating at times when a discussion is good enough to warrant more participation, but I digress.
I said it in my comment(s) above.
Video, for example, works differently than audio does. Digital video brings advantages that generally outweigh costs in the majority of use cases. Analog video, like audio, does take fewer resources and can still be indicated for projects, depending.
For ordinary consumers, DV is a general win. They will move willingly and their older gear will age out and become not so useful.
DA is not a general win. Their gear will not age out, will not become less useful, etc... Unless that is artificial!
And that is exactly why "no headphone jack" is so contentious right now! Most forced migrations make sense. This one really doesn't, and it's due to the nature of audio, existing gear investments, and the fact that going digital really doesn't get a person anything new.
Above that we've got some real spiffy bits. No wires is probably the best of the lot. That's a win, but the cost of it, when one is forced to adopt only a digital path is much higher than it needs to be and everyone knows it.
Should the entire electronics industry abandon analog audio, there will be startups who embrace it. 70's era gear remains entirely relevant. And it will, again, unless forced artificially.
70's era video is marginally relevant. NTSC / PAL at SD resolutions, and on analog gear, have a few sweet spots left, but for almost everyone, using that gear does not make too much sense today.
This is absolutely HUGE.
Put another way, the winners from "no headphone jack" are largely the people not wanting to include a headphone jack. Ordinary people can get all the spiffy stuff and abandon analog as they see fit without ever being required to do or spend on things having basically no value.
I don't get anything new, and my personal cost and risk exposure related to audio goes up! And this is true for very large numbers of people.
That's a losing proposition.
I just happened to think of a great parallel: HD Radio. It's got some nice advantages, but basically does nothing new, and it does so at a very significant cost to everyone.
Said that one would fail, and it basically has. Nobody needs digital radio, and what they failed to understand was that (due to commercials and other annoyances already impacting radio), and how people use radios, and the value of the installed base of radios out there now.
Right now, if you get one of those expensive radios, there are literally give away stations, no commercials! That's how poorly the dynamics surrounding radio are understood by the bigger players. They can't give it away!
I know I would not take a free phone, sans the jack. It's way too much of a hassle to be outside a production proven, time tested, high value, audio ecosystem.
These are all reasons why people who don't really get how their customers do things are going to lose in the marketplace.
Heck, I have not even read a single reason why it has to be done!
Big content wants it, because piracy. (laughable at this point, and that's no joke)
Apple wants it, Google probably wants it, because friendly to big content, also up selling, accessory replacement selling.
Samsung shows us it's entirely possible to make an awesome phone with the jack in it. I own one, and it is actually an awesome phone. Apple has nothing on my Note 8. (But I do love Apple's approach to user data security / privacy.)
There just isn't any value added here. Worse, the cost "savings" from removing the jack is what? $50 bucks tops?
How much do adapters, new earbuds, and related bits cost over the life of the phone? What about a person's time, existing knowledge, investments in gear?
Losing proposition across the board. Again, that's why I do not see a win on this.
I have had mixed results with AirPods on a 2015 MacBook Pro. The earbuds themselves are great, the case is great, but they just don't know how to bluetooth with the laptop of the same company. Every time I put them on, the hunt for a BT connection starts. Sometimes I have to reboot my computer to make them work. It's such a shame that a behemoth like Apple can't make BT work between two of their products. In fact, it's deplorable. How could they ship such a shitty wireless thing?
Try resetting the bluetooth card in your mac, I was having problems with mine taking several attempts to sync (and my magic mouse point blank refusing). Shift-option then click on the bluetooth icon, debug, reset bluetooth card.
I know every trick because I researched many times, but they don't work. Most of the times the bluetooth just disconnects on its own right after connecting, or hangs during 'connecting'. Such a pity that these famous earbuds fail at their basic function - of producing sound.
"AirPods" also cost about the same as one of my phones (a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 running LineageOS [1]) which comes with a 3.5" jack. With one fell swoop I get a phone which does not phone home (other than through the radio firmware blob of course), which runs for a week on a single charge and connects to all those things with 3.5" jacks which I happen upon, be it headphones or cassette adapters or older car radios without bluetooth.
To paraphrase some marketing slogans from the days of yore:
I use AirPods. I even like them. ... but you do realize that the case isn't a magical source of energy, right? You have to charge that thing... and the airpods themselves last a remarkably long time, but they don't last that long, so I find myself having to do this awkward dance in the middle of meetings where I take one out and charge it while relying on the other one, and then I swap to charge that one... I have lightning earpods, but then I can't charge my phone at the same time, so at some point my phone starts running out of battery and I'd have to switch to the airpods anyway (lol). I have tried buying multiple brands of lightning splitters, and they all suck and often the phone isn't quite able to charge even though it says it is charging.
I honestly don't care if I have a "headphone jack": I totally agree with Apple that it was a shitty jack. It was a fragile hole that made it impossible to waterproof the damned phone. How about they just give me two lightning ports? Or a lightning port and a USB-C port, to make my dreams finally come true of only having to carry around one (USB-C) cable while still getting to be compatible with all of the stuff Apple already sold for these devices?
> made it impossible to waterproof the damned phone
Was that what Apple told their customers? Because it's utter bullshit. Sony, Samsung, LG, even those ultra-rugged CAT phones had headphone jacks and at least IP-68 (5m, 1h).
It's not like the old headphones can't be used without a headphone jack. The 3.5mm-to-lightning or 3.5mm-to-usb-c dongles are small and relatively cheap. I just keep mine hooked up to my wired headphones.
>I just keep mine hooked up to my wired headphones.
This works great, until...
You leave the pair of headphones with the dongle behind by mistake and spend the rest of the day frustrated because you have access to a perfectly good pair of headphones but no the dongle.
Or you stick to one primary pair of headphones and are frequently taking the dongle on and off making it even easier to misplace or leave behind.
It's not supposed to be perfect. It's just a solution to that problem.
Remember when optical drives where removed from laptops? We had to carry an external optical drive. Some times we'd forget it. It was inconvenient. But we survived.
No, “we” did not carry external optical drives. By the time Apple removed them, downloading music and software was already mainstream. Removing the headphone jack is not the same.
Optical drives take up lots of space, use a lot of electricity, and have moving parts that can break easily in a portable device like a laptop. A computer like the Macbook Air would simply be impossible with an optical drive.
I'm willing to make that trade, especially given how uncommon DVD's were even by the time the MBA launched. (Although I'll note that my desktop has a BluRay drive and I wouldn't have it any other way.)
What benefit am I getting in exchange for the loss of a headphone jack? An extra couple millimeters of screen real estate?
This is my biggest problem. Even across Apple's own line, you have iPhones with only lightning ports, and iPads with no lightning ports. If I use headphones across those different devices, I'll have to unplug and replug the adapter constantly. Which means that adapter is going to get lost.
Use another brand phone? It couldn't really be simpler, free market and all.
Wireless things suck, I've never considered bluetooth for anything and I really, really hate my bluetooth keyboards. They have nice keys and petite builds, but I haven't used any of them for years now (one Apple, another also with great build). Can't be bothered for batteries, can't be bothered with bluetooth for different linux distros, desktop environments etc. Habits with technology are easily broken even when we don't want to. Give me wired or I'll go without. Also, Wi-Fi internet at home just sucks (IoT/SmartHome I won't even go into, much less that joke called SmartTV [give me regular TVs back please that don't look after me in goody two shoe or shady ways]). Whoever thought Wi-Fi everywhere was a good idea? Reach sucks, gives everyone on the block cancer. Let's stop spamming waves around people. They're not not noise, even if not perceived (microwaves for instance make me want to leap out of the room, it's like a screeching feeling.) I wish ethernet cables were still something people regularly setup, really wish.
I used not to hate technology, really did. Then the executives overdid it and the Wozniaks were put out on the side.
> They're not not noise, even if not perceived (microwaves for instance make me want to leap out of the room, it's like a screeching feeling.)
I don't want to second-guess you, but that sounds more like a high-frequency sound from the microwave mechanism than anything directly caused by microwave radiation. Can you hear the "mosquito sound"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKl_sTh0oHE
I mean, it could be, but I meant like a completely silent sound feeling, there is no sound (well, the microwave oven is noisy, but that bothers me as much as a blabbering TV, which is nearly not as much as this complete screeching silence.) To add to it, it gets 100x more bothersome if I'm within a foot of the oven, whereas being in the same room is still very upsetting and being just outside the doorstep feels more comfortable.
I recently bought a $5 pocket AM/FM radio and found that on AM mode (in between radio stations) I could pick up the radiation from every device in my house. When I moved the radio to my balls (phone), and to my bed (neighbors smart TV), it was very loud there. Sounded like demonic screeching.
Carry my phone in my backpack now, and moved my bed.
Now I just have that smart meter... that one soaks the entire house in a steady whine.
The house electrical system emits radio waves, and so do most screens, many lightbulbs, any device with an electric motor (e.g. hairdryers)..
And of course, your house is bathed by radio and TV station broadcasts, cellphone towers, CB radios, and of course, millions of space objects. Like the Sun.
Please do yourself a favor and google "non-ionizing radiation", then realize that whether or not you have a receiver you are currently being bathed in all sorts of EM radiation. It's not harmful.
Ah that would be the flyback transformer. Plainly audible to us these days now that most TVs don't have them any more. (I think GP is talking about something else btw)
Most of the time in non-old devices it's a bad (either of quality or age) capacitor whining. It's infuriating enough in itself but can give me nausea on top of it!
OK, since I like to write, have more so lately, have started a newsletter before and was planning to start a similar one soon, I'll bite. Except if Poe's law comes bite me and it wasn't in earnest (checked your comment history and you don't seem to make trashy comments like me), what'd you like to read about in this style? Technology, technological change, society, languages, editors, open source? What periodicity would work for you? Also I'll go finally read Snow Crash already (started once.)
Snow Crash is great. I actually just finished Zodiac yesterday and only realized after the fact that it's 30 years old. I'm starting Seveneves now, and it's already blowing my mind.
I've been meaning to read a number of different things, many from friends I've convinced to jot down in my reading suggestions spreadsheet.
It took a new local library opening up, and a holiday, for me to finally get to Snow Crash. I suspect I might be reading a few more of his works very soon.
I don't think I've read any of the others, though I may have started Seveneves at some point, but I did read "The rise and fall of D.O.D.O." (just before Snow Crash in fact!) which I highly highly recommend as well.
> Use another brand phone? It couldn't really be simpler, free market and all.
Well, it could be simpler, and more of a free market, if you could choose your OS across different brands instead of also having to change that, or if you didn't lose access to everything you have already bought for one OS's app marketplace.
There are plenty of things being done by the vendors in this space specifically to combat the effectiveness of the free market, because the free market is good for consumers and bad for short term company profits. Captive consumers are all the rage in the 2000's.
Come on. You can pick Apple that sometimes act forceful in the name of (future|profits) and you can pick Google's personal data collector with smartphone functions bolted on, and that's it.
Actually, I pick old Palm. I'll buy a new Palm Treo like I did 10 years ago and it was glorious old tech. Maybe no whatsapp is a plus and I'll just use from the laptop, tell people to call/sms me during the day.
The latter ain't necessarily true. Android without the Google Apps suite is possible (and relatively commonplace; see also: Fire tablets, Fire TV, and the rest of Amazon's Android-based devices). I ran CopperheadOS without GApps for a couple years with few issues. I currently run GApps on my new phone with LineageOS, but I'm strongly considering doing a backup and reflashing with microG's LineageOS build (which ships microG as a drop-in replacement for GApps, thus cutting Google out of the equation even for apps that would normally require it).
Oh okay I'll just call up my 70 year old dad and tell him this, since it's such an accessible option for 70% of the population.
Fact of the matter is, while nearly every single obnoxious facet of the tech world can be worked around, half the people in my family can't figure out how to turn their phone's wifi on and off, let alone something as complex as replacing the entire OS and figuring out solutions to the various bugs this might introduce.
For an absolutely enormous majority of the population, your choices are something that doesn't care about UX anymore and comes in three flavors of "really expensive" or something that harvests your personal data all day long.
Your 70-year-old grandpa would probably enjoy using a Kindle Fire. My 70+ year old grandma uses hers regularly to play Scrabble. Granted, Amazon's probably doing just as much data collection, but my point stands: Android without Google is possible, by no means obscure, and still reasonably accessible. You just have to know where to look (and come to terms with not having access to Google's ecosystem).
As a counterpoint, I think wires suck. They get in the way, they get tangled, I have to transport them, they break all too often, I trip over them, they knock things over when I move with them, they blow around in the wind, they present a fire risk and a safety risk, they have some kind of physical connection which keeps changing.
Downsides of wireless: remembering to charge, and configuration (a bit annoying if you have multiple devices).
advantages of jacks + wires: reliable, 140 year old industry standard, plug-and-play, universal, cheap, easy to repair, doesn't require battery, doesn't require configuration, doesn't get out of sync, cannot be hacked by a third party.
downsides: sometimes all those wires tend to mix and make knots.
downsides: can't move really far when plugged into stationary device, breaks a lot (at least for me it's almost always the plug or cable that breaks), cable picks up random noise
upsides: my very old thingamajig with a broken display doesn't support anything else
If they break a lot, you should find better headphones.
My JLab Audio Diego earbuds have lasted for the past two years, and I don't treat them well—they stay in my back pocket, and have experienced several trips through the washing machine.
And if they ever do break, the cost of a replacement is $15. That's barely more than the cost of the headphone jack to lightning adapter that I would need if I upgraded from my 6S.
And they have a flat cord that very rarely gets tangled.
I have a pair of Bluetooth headphones that can actually go both ways. It has a wired and wireless mode. The wireless mode is great for exercise and chores, but if I forget to charge them I can still use them.
Is the quality of sound still the same in the wired mode? I have one like this, but the quality of sound in the wired mode is too atrocious to even think of it as an option. So while it ticks a "feature" on the box, it is, for all practical purposes, simply a bluetooth headphone.
Not sure, but it appears that the bypass around the amplifier (which requires power) is just not designed right.
This is almost certainly just a me thing, but just in case: I got some Bluetooth headphones that seemed to sound terrible wired, but it turned out to that the cable had to be pushed and rotated to lock into the headphones at that end. If you really mean atrocious atrocious (and especially if it’s Sennheiser HD 4.40 BT), this might be it?
The normal behaviour for Bluetooth headphones is that they have a better sound quality while wired. There must be something wrong with your phone/cable/headphones.
My experience was opposite. My car stereo has bluetooth and I would often listen to my phone that way because, well convenient .. one day I accidentally used the wired mode because I was charging my phone from it and boom the improvement in sound quality just blew me away.
I looked into this, and the Bluetooth audio codecs just aren't that good. From heated discussions I have learned that the AirPod ones are in fact lossless because they use a grade of codec that isn't commonly available and thus never actually have to decode/reencode or anything like that. It's digital all the way to your ears.
So maybe bluetooth is "as good as" line quality when you've all the pieces lined up; but line quality can be obtained "for free" at all times with commodity hardware. Just a thought.
You mean to say "lossless all the way". Also, it cannot be digital all the way except if you were linking up your aural nerves to the airpod directly. ;)
I guess it depends on whether you define "ears" as "the general vicinity of" or "the actual thing" - I had expected that the former definition was evident but forgot this was HN ...
It's digital all the way to your ears in that you don't need to decode and then reencode, thus eliminating that intermediate "lossy" analogue transition phase. So yeah digital all the way, and by implication "lossless" because of that.
> but I really couldn’t before either considering the length of the charging cable.
The only place this really makes sense is on a long haul flight when you want to make sure you have fully charged phone and listen to music while falling asleep.
A common use case for me was in the car, where I want to be charging it but also use the audio port to interface with one of those tape deck adaptors, or just a rental with a terrible Bluetooth implementation (seriously, some of them scrape all your contacts assuming it is your car, and store them in the center console).
I also have broken or
lost over 3 adaptors now. This wasn’t broken and was pretty transparently done to increase the adoption rate of airpods IMO, so it is pretty frustrating. If I hadn’t had mind-blowing-ly bad experiences with samsung phones I would have jumped ship over this.
Personally, I regularly charge my phone and listen to music through the 3.5mm jack at the same time when I'm driving (my car doesn't have Bluetooth, so I have to use one of those 3.5mm-to-cassette adapters). Using a phone that doesn't have a 3.5mm jack would mean needing to burn quite a bit more money to somehow wire up my car for Bluetooth if I want to still be able to do these things.
Latency is another issue. If you use your phone or tablet to make music then wireless headphones have an unacceptable delay. It's not a huge niche but there are a lot of us out there.
Pro/am musicians and Macbooks are an absolutely massive combo and Apple get a lot of free advertising every time that glowing apple logo appears on stage. I wonder if they know this or will risk removing the jack from laptops.
I also still use my DT770s as my daily headphones when I'm at my computer. I wish I had bought the Pro version way back when, as I believe it has detachable cables, and also higher resistance... it's difficult to modulate the volume on my desktop, as even 4-6% can be loud enough in some circumstances and there's not a lot of room for fine control at that level. In any case, I have had mine around the same length of time as you.
However, I also really love my bluetooth headphones, and that's what I use when I'm not at my desk at home. They also work as wired headphones, but I acknowledge they are not affordable to most people. A charge lasts a really long time, and they have some nice features as well. I don't expect them to last 15 years, however.
I bought a specific pair of wired earbuds with a mic to use for conference calls using my phone (Android). Now that my phone is failing and I'm forced to upgrade, I'm a bit concerned that the USB-to-3.5mm dongle for the Pixel 3 may not be compatible w/ the mic in my earbuds. In pictures it looks like it has a proper tip-ring-sleeve configuration so it might work, but at this point I'm just crossing my fingers until I can test.
Just as an FYI you can buy adapters that increase impedance on your headphones very cheaply on eBay. If you are looking to change sensitivity without changing impedance (which has some effects on sound signature), iFi makes the “Ear Buddy” and “iEMatch” products that are a bit more expensive, but do what they claim on the tin.
With regards to your desktop, I had/have the same issue with the volume being insanely loud and my options being either on at 2% or off since everything else was uncomfortable. I found https://equalizerapo.com/ (for Windows, similar things seem to exist for other systems based on a quick google search) fixed the problem and allowed a lot greater fine control.
To get lower volume overall with Equalizer APO: install, reboot and change the Preamp line in EqualizerAPO/config/config.txt to -20 dB or whatever suits you. It should work as soon as you save.
I don't know if this was the case "back when", but nowadays the pro version does not have detachable cables. The difference is that the cable is coiled (and I think a bit longer) and some parts (that do not affect the sound signature) are of slightly higher quality.
apple ditched the floppy drive with the release of their g3 hardware, the ethernet port with the macbook air (and built in cd/dvd drive), before that they ditched the serial & parallel port, etc.
any of us still missing those?
needless to say that it kinda sucks when a new device forces you to buy new adapters / peripherals, but in the long run, is this really an issue?
I would miss a built in ethernet port. (My Thinkpad X230 FTW)
Anyways, your examples are not exactly the same as this situation. In the cases of removing the floppy drive and CD/DVD drives, it was upgrading one technology for another which was able to hold more data, was a more stable medium than the predecessor, and was generally more reliable. The 3.5mm->bluetooth was not an upgrade in stability or reliability, and the ethernet->wifi change was not an upgrade in anything except 'mobility' (but systems with ethernet jacks at that time typically had wifi too, so, again, it was a general downgrade in functionality).
Loss of the ethernet port is a real pain. The cat5 dimensions are awkward for a thin laptop so you can accept it for a machine that does basically nothing locally. But as soon as you have a hundred GB of stuff on your laptop you need to transfer you wish you still had wired ethernet. In fact, 10G. And then you buy a Thunderbolt to 10G dongle. It is brilliant that the new Mac Mini has 10G on-board.
Back in the day serial and parallel were very useful for interfacing to real world machines. Now everyone uses a simple linux board like an rpi, but in the interim it was seriously inconvenient to interface. USB1 is absolute rubbish, USB2 not much better.
The blutooth headphone is a different device than a regular headphone. They have worse sound quality, which might not be so noticable, but they also have to pair and the wireless connection isn't reliable. The headphones are also another device that needs to be charged and has a battery, and in the case of the AirPods, the battery is in bad shape after a year and the device must be replaced.
In the case of the ports you've mentioned, there were other improved connections to move towards. The blutooth headphone is not improved over the 3.5mm cable unless you are so vehemently opposed to the idea of a cable that you would live with its shortcomings. Market leaders like Apple and Samsung have made investments into this market (beats, for example), and to try and dominate market share are extorting their users into buying extraneous, disposable accessories that aren't an objective improvement of existing standards, all while parading the recycled content of their latest 128gb dual core laptops.
I use my AirPods a lot (like 1h to 2h daily for commuting and chores) and after one and a half year, I have no battery issues. I don’t recall depleting the battery ever.
but also because people have old vinyl disks which they can revive. and people complained about the cold sound of CDs forever. it's not like tech, where you don't really see people crying over their burnt memory chips.
Especially for audio connectors, i don't think it is a coincidence that the 3.5mm jacks and its fatter brother have not changed since forever. people wanted to use it with their older stuff.
That's becoming increasingly more difficult on the Android side, with so many high-end vendors looking to remove the headphone jack too.
Hell, OnePlus ran a campaign eight months ago laughing about others removing the headphone jack, only to remove it six months later on the 6T.
I bought the OnePlus 6 because I wanted a good phone with a close-to-stock OS and a headphone jack. Nowadays, I think you'll struggle to get both, and I think that we're one manufacturer away (Samsung) away from the market joining Apple and Google in getting rid of the jack.
I'll support it for as long as I can, because I use the jack every single day, but I fear that in three years time the high-end market will have left us behind.
I've hung onto my first generation Pixel for largely this reason. There isn't a lot in the new models to entice me to switch however the loss of the 3.5mm port was the tipping point for me not to purchase either of the updates. I just put a new factory battery in my Pixel ($90 CAD) and it's back to like new again. At the moment I think I'll hold on to it for at least another year.
My phone has an FM tuner built-in but, for whatever ridiculous manufacturer reason, it's disabled by default and can only be switched on in some kind of debug mode which won't allow it to play in the background whilst doing other things on the phone.
I could stream the local radio station, sure, but that's a fair whack of data just doesn't need to clog up my internets / quota.
One of the big reasons given was to make a slimmer phone, but I've got the iPhone SE I use personally here next to the iPhone 7 I use for work, and, if you were to run your hand over them, you wouldn't detect a difference in height off the table.
Apple has had great success in the past by pushing new standards in computer peripherals, deprecating old standards, and generally moving the industry forward by fiat.
I think we've all benefitted somewhat from this attitude, even if it was inconvenient.
The distinction here is that the 3.5mm standard isn't/wasn't a computer peripheral standard. It is/was an audio industry standard. There are many uses for 3.5mm that have nothing to do with phones/tablets/laptops/desktops.
Additionally, the audio industry has a different obsolescence timeline than computer equipment. Audiophile and pro audio headphones (for example) represent a significant investment and are intended to last many years.
In my view, Apple's approach to this was a kind of chauvinistic hubris. No, I don't want to use a $15 adapter of dubious quality on my $1500 custom molded in-ear monitors. No, I can't just get a new pair. No, I can't re-sell them, they only fit my ears. No, they wouldn't sound the same even if a bluetooth version were to become available. No, I doubt the 4 person company that makes them is eager to try to figure out how to make a lightning version, even if they have the in-house expertise.
The decision really shows a lack of understanding of the world outside of computer manufacturing, and it is too bad others followed suit.
Ah yes, let me just throw out the hundreds of dollars worth of apps, not to mention the rest of my investment in the ecosystem, because I might have to buy, once, an adapter that costs 1% of the sticker price of the phone and can just be permanently left attached.
Unfortunately that vendor lock-in is exactly the problem. We don't have easy free consumer choice to just pick up the phone that does have a 3.5mm jack, so we are left to complain as per the original article.
Saw that coming a mile away. I won't use an Apple phone. Never would, probably never will. We had this whole lock in discussion in the 90's. Got my first Linux distribution back then. Red Hat 5.2 in the nice box. That investment has paid and paid and paid...
I like some Mac computers a lot. Happy customer. 2012 Mac Book Pro is a sweeet machine! Has all the ports, is plenty fast, sexy. No, I don't run iTunes and friends.
Today, I will run most anything on a computer. I don't mind Android. There are open alternatives all over the place and I use them, moving from platform to platform with relative ease. This all gets easier over time. I can even dumpster dive and get up, running and make some quick cash.
Android is a reasonable, general purpose computer when I want one on the go. Programming, terminal? Check. Content create? Check. Comms of all kinds? Check. Heck, I can through a VM on my Samsung and actually do stuff using the pen. Amazing. If I choose to carry bluetooth keyboard / pad combo, it's happy to show me a pointer and I'm off to the races! And device support? That phone will operate a portable, USB floppy drive, if I need it.
Apple has nothing at all on that environment.
The pads? Throwaways, got one given to me, and it's a great toddler learning tool. Throwaway app buys. I won't ever take the thing seriously, though Mrs loves to stream on it.
As for attached... Nice phone, what's that thing sticking out of it like that... Seriously. Honestly, if it were me stuck with that, I would try and find a case with the jack built in.
And here's the thing! You got that choice forced on you. it's completely unnecessary. Forced migrations happen sometimes. That's OK. This one is unnecessary. There is no meaningful gain, and quite a few downsides to digital only audio delivery.
Finally, yeah. Easy. Only hurts the first time. Rip that bandaid. No joke! Just start. Lots of help out there, and you will benefit over the longer haul.
Once you do, and start navigating away from that lock in, it all improves nicely. I've helped a few people do that. They get there. Soon, they are showing me cool things they found out there in the wild.
I'm happy for you, but please don't assume your desires and motivations are the same as mine. I'm happier with my Mac and iPhone than I ever was running Debian for over a decade, and the headphone jack is a complete non-issue for me since I use Bluetooth headphones.
I'm sure the millions of happy iPad owners would be thrilled to hear you categorize the device as a toddler learning tool.
I'm completely bewildered by your position that a lightning-to-audio-jack dongle is somehow a big deal, given that when it's plugged in it's virtually indistinguishable from the cable you would have plugged into an audio jack anyway. The white cord attaching my headphones is a full inch and a half longer than it otherwise would be, what a horror!
And finally, I'm no more locked in to the Apple ecosystem than I would be to any other ecosystem—Windows-based or Linux-based—that I switched to, over time. It's irrelevant to me if one platform is "open" if I wouldn't be happy with the software available on that platform. I used Linux as my sole environment for something like fifteen years. Been there, done that, happier on a Mac nowadays.
It's not concern, just straight up anti-lock in advocacy. Written for anyone, including you, passing by.
Any happy iPad owners, and I am a happy iPad owner mind you, can and should be perfectly secure in all of that, not concerned at all about how I, again a happy iPad owner, happen to use my iPad. And my primary use case happens to be all the throw away, non-serious use cases.
It's a dongle. It is completely unnecessary. Lots of people do not mind unnecessary encumbrances. One of the more frequently seen scenarios is expression of style.
I am just not one of those people, and I'm gonna pass completely on weak sauce marginalization of so many other great points made, other than I suspect they don't apply in your case, and you are about you. Fair enough.
You and I run about the same on general computing. I run a mix, love Macs that have actual ports on them, the same going for Win 10, 7 and Linux. And I run a mix of open and closed software too. The point being to be happy, while avoiding lock in that could be harmful.
In a pinch, I can drop pretty much any software I use, get the necessary data out of it, and into something else with few worries. That's the open data, open computing, anti-lock in discussion in play. No need to be a purist or zealot.
What that means is this:
I really loved the Mac Book with ports. The current ones? Laughable. Won't recommend, nor purchase. That could change, say when I see some ports again. Or not. Being a happy customer when I can be happy as a customer is my point in all of this exactly.
Apple got me to buy a Mac. Then they fucked way up. I won't buy another one right now, and because I do manage data, software, all that stuff, nothing really lost, other than my business for Apple. Lots of options out there, and I went Lenovo. Good to go. Always will be.
And later, I may well pick up a Dell. Who knows? I'm not locked in, get to evaluate my use cases, product features, and make selections rather freely. And that's what I really like to empower people to do.
Really, I do not need, nor want your thanks. I'll just ignore that bit and stay laser focused on the forced non-choice Apple thinks is better for it's users than it really is for very large numbers of it's users right now. Ideally, Apple cleans that right up, and it's all good.
...until it isn't, which again, is exactly why lock in is to be avoided.
Already helped a few people move off Apple phones and out of that eco-system. Likely to get more. No worries.
yes. for example, i sometimes use my phone as a high quality source for outputting audio that i then sample into my op-1 or octatrack. yes, those are niche products though not niche use cases, and i think it’s an example where apple’s usage dictation doesn’t work.
what is funny is that apple gave the excuse of wanting to save space getting rid of the audio jack. but my lg v35 has an audio jack and is thinner than and just as nicely designed as the iphone xs. additionally, lg actually has a high end audio dac in the phone, so music on my v35, and the v10 before it, sounds insanely good on my beyerdynamic headphones.
if i were to move to an iphone, apple would want to take these experiences away from me. and for what? pure hubris predicated on the business plan to sell more accessories like dongles and headphones mascaraed as design courage.
The $15 adapter is most likely of similar quality as the DAC and other audio components in the phone, so I don’t see the point. (Also, most people I know with $1000 headphones use an external audiophile-grade DAC anyway.)
They might, but why should they have to? That tiny ESS DAC in LG phones is measurably better than a lot of external "audiophile-grade" DACs. It doesn't compromise the design or the water resistance of the phone either and probably doesn't add much cost relative to other components.
This is basically an arrogant move that can't really be technically justified.
E.g. By arguing that better external options exist - better external cameras also exist, should we get rid of the camera too?
> Additionally, the audio industry has a different obsolescence timeline than computer equipment
This I have studio headphones I bought in 1995 that I still use nearly daily (albeit not with my phone). I've replaced the earpads on them at least 5 times.
I would miss the headphone jack if I ever bother upgrading my iPhone. As it is, I use my Bluetooth headphones a lot at home. Noise canceling and no cord is pretty nice.
But for very good audio I use my normal sennheisers
Apple and Google seem to have approached removing the headphone jack, not as a way to reduce costs to the customer by eliminating an obsolete feature they don't use but, instead, as a way to increase the money they can squeeze out of customers by forcing them to replace perfectly good headphones they are currently using with new headphones hopefully made by Apple or Google.
I'm honestly not surprised by this. Headphone technology hasn't really changed for many decades. A good pair of cans made a very long time ago are probably still a good pair of cans. I have some Audio Technica woodies that I absolutely love and are still going strong after more than a decade. To Apple and Google, this is a state of affairs that cannot be allowed to stand! Where's the planned obsolescence and constant product turnover? Apple tried to make their earbuds a disposable commodity that need to be replaced frequently, but people caught onto the fact that it was just due to bad build quality and kept buying stuff from other companies. So, change up the connectors and force wireless standards that are, quite frankly, not that good for audio and ripe for eventual upgrade (i.e. bluetooth) into headphones so people won't be able to use the same pair for decades. Profit!
So what should consumers do if they like their current headphones or just don't want to deal with adapters, charging bluetooth devices, or sorting out multiple incompatible connectors? Buy phones that still have headphone jacks, like the Samsung S9.
I hate the direction they are moving with the port situation on their products, which is to nickel and dime you for the privilege of using different connections. I can buy a brand new iPhone and macbook, and come home with no way to connect them with the supplied cables, I need to buy a dongle. I can't use the same headphones with my computer and phone anymore, either; apple doesn't include the 3.5mm dongle with their phones anymore and instead would gladly tack on $10 for 1-inch of cable that should have never existed on this earth in the first place.
When Apple first removed the headphone jack I was a big opponent of what they had done. It didn't affect me personally though, as I had an old laptop and phone both with headphone jacks and no plans to upgrade. Still I was quite vocal about how stupid it was to remove them.
At the time I was working at home, and had an old set of Sennheiser headphones with a 3m long cable that I usually used for music. Occasionally I'd end up tangled up in the cable, all attempts to prevent it failed. For calls I had a cheap Sennheiser headset which did the trick, and did (what I thought was) a pretty decent job of blocking out noise when travelling.
Earlier this year I went back to the office, and needed some noise cancelling headphones, so got Sony MDR-1000X which are Bluetooth. The noise cancelling really puts the old headset I had to shame, when on an aircraft if I play light music I literally can't hear any outside noise. They are comfortable to wear all the time (a few times in summer my ears did get a bit sweaty) and I usually charge them once or a maximum twice a week, even though I'm using them most of the day. When they say they are low I still get a few hours usage, so just put them on charge at lunch when it first warns me.
Compared to my old headphones the noise quality is about the same, but these have built in volume and track controls, and a microphone. Bluetooth just works for me, and the range is not a problem. I can easily have my phone on one side of my apartment, and listen to music on the other. I have them paired with my phone and computer, and can easily switch the source without major issues. It just works (apart from some weird Linux bug where it uses the wrong audio profile, but on other OSes it's fine).
A few months ago I got a new phone and it didn't come with an audio jack. I tried to find one that did, but this had the best specs for what I wanted, so it was a sacrifice I would have to make. The phone come with a dongle, but I haven't even removed it from the packaging in the box. I just haven't needed it, and don't care that it's gone.
Same thing on my laptop, it has an audio jack (output only) but I don't care if it's removed as I never use it now. On my PC I had to buy a cheapo USB sound card as the built in audio jack had lots of static, so I don't really care if that's removed either.
Bluetooth is good enough, it's just going to be a while until a $15 set of Bluetooth earphones are at a similar quality level to a $15 set of wired earphones. I do agree the execution could have been done better by Apple (e.g. lightning headphones, which you can't use on all Apple hardware) and it was possibly a bit premature, but eventually we would have reached this point.
As for the so called audiophiles who need it, wouldn't you be better off with an external soundcard, rather than relying on whatever $0.50 chip the manufacturer can find?
Well, I don't like the pushiness of it. Just take how this story dropped off the front page like a brick. If someone slapped me on the butt or head and said "hey there, you look like you really want some nice ice cream", even if I actually were up for ice cream, I would lose my currently existing appetite for ice cream until the memory of that creep has faded.
It doesn't matter if someone else accepts being treated that way, or didn't quite catch what is going on.
I also don't like how the general shift to selling experiences and status symbols instead of tools. The sheer inability to leave people alone and in peace with what works for them, just because it some marketing people have an idea how to get them to "engage" some more and buy more stuff. For example it's kinda nuts that laptops and smartphones are advertised with how thing they are, they're thin enough either way. In a context of humanity hardly even beginning to address the problems our consumerism caused, this is all just lethal circus. All that went on before the removal of the headphone jack, but that is part of it.
Since the Iraq war I avoid flying when I can, even before climate change became scary real, of course I'll avoid products of companies whose attitudes are incompatible with a rational marketplace. Because either that will end, or humanity will end. Just like I don't rely on a $0.50 chip, I don't rely on the "ideas" of equivalent thinkers, or the "awareness" of the mass of people.
> this had the best specs for what I wanted, so it was a sacrifice I would have to make
Well, to me that is entirely backwards. Customers are looking for something, but are denied that thing because companies have other "visions" for them. People find the story interesting and it garners a lot of votes quickly, so it is dropped to the second page just like that... Nothing spells "courage" like that kind of stuff. I just checked, just in the time it took me to write this it dropped from the middle of the second to the third page, but still managed to garner more votes. If the companies treat their fanbases as children and they end up acting like this on their behalf, flagging and downvoting what they don't want to hear, and/or if the companies themselves fuck with online discussions and the consumers look the other way, I'm against it by default either way, before we could possibly get to any technical details.
In short, there is a difference between a good reason for something, and a rationalization of something that was pushed onto you. Yes, I also use an external soundcard and like wireless headphones, but not for mobile devices, and the discussion isn't about "why did most people buy devices withouth headphone jacks once those became available too", this is about things being pushed unilaterally, for sheer profit.
> Well, to me that is entirely backwards. Customers are looking for something, but are denied that thing because companies have other "visions" for them
I don't think that is really fair. If I really needed a headphone jack, I could have got a new phone with one, but one of my requirements which was more important than a headphone jack was price, so it was a trade off I was happy to make. Maybe if you want to stay in the Apple ecosystem you are out of luck, but this is the sort of thing Apple has always done (floppy drive, optical drive, soldered ram, battery). If you want to stick with their ecosystem, you should be willing to follow whatever they decide is best - it should be expected from them. You could argue it is wrong, but from a financial perspective it is most definitely working, and many people are still willing to support them.
On a similar note earlier this year I switched (around the same time as I got the Bluetooth headphones) from an Apple laptop to a Thinkpad laptop. I couldn't justify the price increases and limitations Apple has put in-place in a quest for thinness, and the way MacOS seems to be heading. For nearly half the price of a new Macbook Air (the previous gen), I got a new machine which is more powerful, has better battery life, has more ports, is smaller (in area, not thickness) and lighter. For the work I do, Linux provides a much more friendly developer environment than MacOS.
I wasn't speaking of just Apple though, that desire to "lock in" is very common. It took actual regulation in the EU get get unified charging cables. Customers should be ahead of regulation in protecting their own interests.
> You could argue it is wrong, but from a financial perspective it is most definitely working
By that point you're arguing squarely on behalf of the bank account of the company, the customer is completely removed. They are just someone who "should be willing to follow whatever they decide is best", even if it's just best for the company profits, which in the case of Apple they kinda hoard.
> many people are still willing to support them
If that makes my opinion invalid, by the same token my opinion makes theirs invalid. Since I have my opinion, the fact that people assume the position as a helpless consumer, rather than a equal in a fair transaction, be it with Apple or others, is the problem, not the solution.
> (For me this post is still #6 on the front page)
Yes, that was shortly after my comment, but before that it dropped really quickly, down to page 3.
"Without a doubt, even from the vantage of today, 2016 will go down as one of the saddest sack years in recent history. A reality show billionaire was elected president."
Right off the bat, in the first paragraph, with an unnecessary political statement. Turns off half the audience right there. Everything said thereafter is taken with a giant grain of salt.
Is this person living in such a bubble that he can't have a conversation without mentioning Trump?
It is my strong opinion that Apple's "design courage" is business driven than actual innovation. The reason being is that it was released the same day as the Apple AirPods. A similar comment can be said for Google's "design courage" for the Pixel 2, when on the same day they released the Pixel Buds.
If they were concerned about space and waterproofing, could they have just made a magsafe lightning port instead of a hole taking that amount of space at the bottom?
740 comments
[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 442 ms ] threadHeadphone jacks serve a useful purpose, most phones could still have them without compromising other properties, but its been made fashionable to go without.
fashionable implies people are making a choice. i guess you can say they are, somewhat, but... if you want larger storage and good camera in a portable device while maintaining any investment in a particular ecosystem... you have to do without a jack.
i've stuck with my iphone se and plan to for a while longer, hoping apple will eventually put out another device with headphone jack. or perhaps i can find an android device i like well enough that still has a jack (those seem to be harder to find too)
And no human’s life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack. But a lot of our lives are just a little worse.
The author also points towards active de-standardisation between Android and iOS:
"if only there was one universal audio port they both could use"
Apple gets an advantage from this with their iron-grip on compatible peripherals, but I don't know why any of the Android manufacturers would follow suit. The ugliness of the impracticality of fashion.
Bluetooth?
But around once every 8 times I get into my car, I need to turn off/on Bluetooth on my car, my phone, or both to get it to connect. More rarely, I have to reboot my phone. I haven't used a Bluetooth headset with my phone in several years, but I had the same problem then.
So I don't think Bluetooth is that reliable "works every time" standard.
As much as I prefer headphone jacks, I'll readily admit that my $15 BT headphones from Amazon connect every time I turn them on.
Car BT implementations are actually an interesting world in of themselves, I've seen car BTs wreck havok with other BT peripherals attached to a phone. The level of "how?" was truly amazing.
Bluetooth pairing always seems a bit unclear. Do I start the scan on my phone or the device? Cars seem to be particularly bad in making this clear or otherwise don't work reliably per instructions.
If you want a really bad Bluetooth experience, see Acura. Calls can require active "transfer" to Bluetooth devices when you're streaming, and there is otherwise clunkiness and competition for the car's audio system, for instance if you try to use car nav.
And, woe be unto you if you have multiple in-range devices. There's a pretty good chance it'll vomit and you'll end up with mixed pairing profiles that essentially require you to restart the car and/or disable Bluetooth on one device.
Not sure how they managed to get Bluetooth so wrong, but it's a solid contributor to an overall poor infotainment center design.
Source: Previously worked on head unit FW.
CTIA or OMTP?
every time I have had to use wired earphones since have been worse than if I had my AirPods on me
Mine is. The statement is false.
> And no human’s life is measurably better since Apple had the “courage” to remove the 3.5 mm jack.
The Airbud designers could have designed the same product even if the iPhone still had a headphone jack, so it's hard to say definitively that their life is measurably better now.
So I'm personally glad they've removed the headphone jack, because it will help push wireless into the mass market (and bring down prices) at a faster rate than it otherwise would have.
Now of course, there's lots of people who don't find it a positive like I do. My point is not that everyone should find the jack removal great, my point is that it's wrong to claim that it's a disadvantage for everyone.
On a separate note, people like to shit on Apple for that "courage" claim, but even if removing the jack was a bad decision, I think it's fair to call it a courageous one, because they knew well that they'd get a lot of shit for making that decision. Look at what gets said every time the headphone jack issue is brought up on HN.
> in fact, it just shows the truth, in that apple just wants to be able to sell more and more dongles and bluetooth headphones
The idea that this is simply a cheap cash-grab sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
But even if it's a purely financial decision, so what? Aren't financial considerations behind most things companies do?
If HN is to be believed, most people absolutely hate the fact that the phones don't have headphone jacks. So if people hate it, and won't buy the phones because of it, then how can it also be a cash grab?
no i didn't. i said apple wants to sell more wireless headphones and dongles. removing the audio jack forces users to look at the new shiny airpods, or whatever they're called, and say "i need that". then they need dongles for integration purposes. yet, they didn't need the dongle before and could still buy wireless headphones.
of course it's a cash grab. that is how apple operates. conspiracy theory? the ceo is literally an expert in operations and logistics, probably apple's greatest strength behind their marketing. it can't be any other decision, because like i said, other phone makers are able to integrate it just fine.
If people are going to buy more wireless headphones because of these phones, then they're going to buy them from a range of manufacturers -- in fact mostly other manufacturers because the Apple ones are so pricey.
If people are going to buy more wireless headphones because of these phones then the prices will go down. Do you dispute this? Because this is the point that you originally claimed I didn't make.
> i said apple wants to sell more ... dongles.
Do you know that the phones (up until latest models) come with a dongle so there's not going to be a large number of sales of them?
> of course it's a cash grab. that is how apple operates
It's ridiculous to suggest that everything apple does is just a cheap cash grab.
What's so ridiculous about it? Have you not seen the rate at which Apple are increasing the prices across all their products?
And petty practices like not including the lightening to 3.5mm adapter or fast charger on a $1000+ phone e.t.c.
your argument is that it helps the wireless headphone market. i don’t think it does in a way that actually matters, but even that doesn’t explain why it was removed in the first place. why does apple care about that market outside of their own sales? the real reason why they removed it is to further increase accessory sales and to market themselves as a design leader, which further sells devices. they have created this mystique that they do and others will follow. unfortunately, that is somewhat the case given other dynamics.
the fact of the matter is that there is zero benefit to the consumer of an iphone for having the audio jack removed. there is benefit to apple’s cash flow by removing it. and here we are.
Apple has always removed design features that they don't think are where things should head in the future. That's important to do in the longer term. If you consider any single one of the things they've removed from their computers, it might not seem a big deal, but together they are. Removing things they don't see as part of the future helps them to push technology in the direction they think is best. And removing what they see as unnecessary features can save on costs - costs that might be small per unit but large in terms of the sorts of volumes they are dealing with.
Instead they include wired headphones with a proprietary plug.
If you want high quality headphones with an iphone you have to buy some that license a proprietary Apple protocol or chip or settle for lower sound quality generic Bluetooth audio.
I am aware this is an issue for some people. At the same time it's not an issue for other people.
> doesn’t include wireless headphones or an adapter for 3.5mm in the box.
Their latest models don't include adapters, their earlier ones without headphone jacks did.
> If you want high quality headphones with an iphone you have to buy some that license a proprietary Apple protocol or chip or settle for lower sound quality generic Bluetooth audio.
The issue with Bluetooth isn't Apple's fault, though.
But if you want high quality headphones then, yes, you have that choice to make. But we need to acknowledge that not everyone has those requirements.
Conspiracy theories are sometimes true.
In this case, vendor lock-in is Apple's bread and butter, and it doesn't take any mental gymnastics at all to recognize that removing a standard and universal port without any actually good reason fits that pattern remarkably well.
2) Bluetooth is a standard, and Apple isn't the only company that makes Bluetooth headphones.
Apple don’t support high quality Bluetooth audio standards except with the license of their own proprietary technology.
This same point applies to the criticisms of a lack of a headphone jack, too: the things those people are concerned about, such as sound quality, aren't an issue for everybody, either.
If you allow only one technology, it will be cheaper irrespective of whether the disallowed technology is better or not.
This makes Apple’s decision worse. It’s an admission that wireless audio is an inferior technology, and that the only way for it to succeed is by removing the alternative, ans/or making it significantly worse.
Did the existence of cars destroy the existence of horses? Is Apple stopping all companies from using headphone jacks?
Doing something you know will be unpopular is not automatically "courageous". Sometimes it's just stupid. I'm sure you can think of plenty of examples.
Many people mock the idea that removing the headphone jack required any courage.
In this simile, the consumers are the bear, and Apple is the moron punching it.
It's not as if you couldn't use wireless headphones before the headphone jack was removed. Now that the jack is removed, you're forced to use a USB-C dongle (which has its disadvantages) or purchase expensive Bluetooth headphones if you want a decent enough quality / battery life.
Ancestor comments of this have explained that.
Removing headphone jack speeds up uptake of wireless headphones, and greater uptake of them makes them cheaper. These are changes that have already happened. This has benefited people who want to use wireless headphones.
Does it really? I haven't noticed any change in price that could be attributed to this and I bought a pair a few weeks ago, so I'm somewhat up to date with the pricing.
What I'm saying is that I don't see any change that could be attributed specifically to the trend of removing headphone jacks from phones.
1) Prices have noticeably come down since they've been removed. This in itself is not proof, but at the same time, what is your proof that these phones have nothing to do with it?
2) Removing the headphone jack has given greater impetus for manufacturers to produce wireless headphones, and to produce lower-end models. More volume, more competition.
3) Removing the headphone jack has given more impetus for people to purchase wireless headphones. There are definitely people that have bought wireless headphones because of this, who wouldn't have bough them if their phones had a builtin headphone jack.
2 and 3 mean more volume, and that means lower prices.
Also, the argument I've been making is not focused just on now. It's also an argument about things going forward.
2) Aliexpress has nearly 100k results for bluetooth headphones there has always been plenty of competition, they are still shit. https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&initiative_id=S...
3) I agree with this more people have spent alot of money on bluetooth headphones that don't work, how is this a benefit to anyone but the corporations that profit from it?
As you said yourself you can get bluetooth headphones for $20, but you wouldn't because they are shit. We don't need lower prices we need better value headphones, removing the headphone jack has done nothing to help this.
There where cheap and shitty, wired and wireless headphones before they removed the headphone jack, there are cheap and shitty wired and wireless headphones after, the market is not better off and the customers are especially not better off.
Edit- AirPods are the first decent bluetooth headphones, they are the competition not the lack of a jack. Look at that aliexpress link its not even a competition they are just copying the style and shoving the same shitty gear inside.
Also the value comes from the fact that manual pairing is still shit - I only do it via NFC because I haven't been to date able to do so alternatively.
1) And by doing this we create even more e-waste!
2) I do _not_ want wireless headphones! I almost exclusively use headphones when I am traveling by bus and train. This happens every 2-4 weeks. At the moment I have a cheap pair of wired headphones in my backpack. They need 0 maintenance. if I need them I just use them. They never needs charging and they never will break. If I have to switch to wireless headphones a) I have to start to take care about charging them and b) they will break after 3 years because the battery dies and can not be replaced.
You could say that about anything new.
> 2) I do _not_ want wireless headphones!
Good for you, no-one is forcing you to use them.
All I have ever done in this comment thread is argue against the idea that removing the headphone jack has zero benefits for anyone. And yet I'm getting piled on by people basically accusing me of trying to force everyone to go wireless.
As if pointing out that some people have different wants from theirs is somehow denying their wants. It's an amazing lack of perspective.
Is it that hard to accept that someone else has a different view from your own, and that them expressing it is not the same as trying to force it upon you?
I think the question remains whether making wired headphones harder to use had zero benefits. That's a different question than whether making wireless headphones easier to use had.
You made an economic argument for the former question - but you can't make that argument and say "no one is forcing you" at the same time.
I know no one was being forced to use wired headphones before. That has nothing at all to do with an argument about the consequences of removing the jack.
A wireless headset requires charging, requires pairing, is more expensive, is more likely to break. It's not a superior technology, it's an alternative technology. You don't eliminate options just because alternatives exist.
In the case of headphones, their primary function is to connect to a device and deliver sound to your ears. Wireless headphones do not do this better than wired headphones. At all. They have a specific use case advantage related to the connection format, but that isn't universally better because it carries drawbacks as well.
I think the issue is that BT has always been a catastrophy in terms of ergonomy, today things are better but still a bit hazardous. Maybe a super simple wireless protocol for managing audio streams (and handling multiple sinks) would change that
They are already in the mass market the problem is they suck.
I have tried a bunch of cheap Chinese bluetooth headphones that cost from $20-$60 they all sound like $5 wired headphones have about 2 hours battery life and break after a month.
I have tried bluetooth head phones that where $200 beats by drea they worked as well as the Chinese headphones they just cost 10 times the price.
Removing the headphone jack has forced people to spend a lot of money on shitty headphones, thats what your glad of.
...and the headphone jack was removed several years ago, so what's your point?
What I'm saying is that it's makes the prices go down. That means better quality ones will get cheaper.
The bluetooth headphones I use are fine. I've heard most people say that AirPods are great.
> Removing the headphone jack has forced people to spend a lot of money
How is it forcing anything on anyone? One, you don't have to buy the phone, and two, you can use the supplied lightning-adapter headphones, or use an adaptor.
And no, it's not courageous to do something dumb and getting skewered for being dumb is not evidence of courage.
You can call it dumb all you like, but whether something is dumb or not is completely separate from whether it is courageous or not.
I'm amazed by people hating something so much that therefore, in their minds, makes it impossible to have other qualities that might have a positive connotation.
But.. can't they just make a waterproof headphone jack??
The obvious reason is a decrease in BOM which corresponds directly with an increase (however so slightly per unit) in margin. Apple made it "ok" to whack this functionality, so why wouldn't every manufacturer join in?
Eh, you could have said the same thing when they removed serial ports, 3.5" floppy drives, CD drives, etc. etc. etc.
Yes, the world is moving forward. Yes, it's a little inconvenient.
The use-case for the 3.5mm headphone jack is still well and truly within the mainstream, and will probably stay there for some time as per the comment in the blog:
the right pair of headphones was the pair of headphones in front of you, or in your pocket, or mangled at the bottom of your bag. It didn’t matter.
There's a lot of legacy-weight hanging around in people's houses, bags, and workplaces.
Your point, however, isn't completely lost on me. I still miss CD drives occasionally, having to retrieve an older laptop in order to grab data from a disc I haven't yet bothered to archive to an ISO file. However, removing a CD drive from a laptop feels like a much higher percentage space saver than losing the 3.5mm jack from a smartphone.
And yes, this was apparently Steve Job's idea, as he felt that fans were "too noisy and inelegant". I imagine that he felt that fans were holding humanity back, and smugly told people who disagreed that they were clinging to obsolete technology.
It got so bad, that Apple actually advised their customers to physically lift and drop their Apple IIIs to re-seat the chips that had popped out from the excessive heat.[2]
Of course, if today Apple decided that fans were obsolete again, and the latest Macbooks were twice as heavy and still overheated, then it would become the new normal, and it would be hard to find computers that had fans anymore, and we would long for the days when we could just use computers for as long as we wanted without worrying about them overheating. And on the internet, commenters would say that it wasn't a big deal at all, and if you were some sort of power user that wanted to use your laptop for more than a few hours at a time, you should buy a $250 cooling pad for it.
[1]: http://lowendmac.com/2015/apple-iii-chaos-apples-first-failu...
[2]: https://www.tekrevue.com/apple-iii-drop/
It still has a fan though.
If? Apple's recent laptops have been notoriously undercooled, and the processors can only run near full speed for a brief moment.
The only difference is that they throttle instead of self-damaging.
The world didn't care about wireless headphones until their wired option was taken away. It's a solution to a problem of their own making.
It would have been more effective if the author didn't cherry-pick only the facts which support his argument.
Apple's own 3.5mm -> lighting dongle is surprising resistant to water (I've spilled coffee on mine and it still works), but I can't find any information of whether the dongle itself is waterproof. I've looked.
Also, Samsung made a phone with a waterproof 3.5mm female port. They weren't the first.
https://www.gore.com/products/categories/venting?view=portab...
I agree that it's also really easy to make 3.5 mm jack sockets waterproof.
Good old shortsightedness at play here. No one looks past this year or years to come when faced with changes. Here's what I think, based on history, is happening here:
# Wires are more bad than good for average consumer:
a. Neglected security based on assumption that since it's not wireless, it's immune to eavesdropping (think side-channel attacks). Wireless puts security upfront and center.
b. Cables get lost, break, are not long enough, are not compatible, damage the connectors, bad cables damage the device, cost extra, etc. Wireless doesn't.
c. Cables are cumbersome. They get tangled, you need to remember to carry them, have backups, etc.
d. Cables have short range.
Apple evidently cares quite a bit about user experience. Wires hurt user experience so they want to get rid of them, one by one. You can't push towards superfast, low power and generally more advanced mobile devices and accessories, if the industry has no reason to do so (because everything works and has for the past 50 years).
It's tiring reading every day how someone is upset because their favorite feature is gone because they can't see past their front door.
a. because wireless is less secure than wired.
b. loss and breakage isn't a wired-exclusive problem
c. backups? so long as you bring backup wireless things as well, no worries
d. Fair enough, but long cables are possible, and in regards to a smart phone, most people carry it on their person so it's not generally a problem - although the freedom to roam about the house with your phone on the counter while you're vacuuming is advantageous in those particular scenarios. Pending wireless range.
Sounds like your list is a desperate one too.
I would have hated if the XS was thicker, or if it still had bezels.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XSC_UG5_kU
What an absolutely idiotic idea. I've started leaving those stupid dongles everywhere, but even they don't for with everything. Fashion over function, with an eye to more lock-in.
I lost the dongle long ago and have no idea where to buy a new one. Google doesn't seem to sell them and everywhere online says the don't even work.
https://store.google.com/us/product/usb_c_headphone_adapter?...
If they had replaced the 3.5mm with another lightning port, I would have upgraded by now. This single port thing is just silly. Same thing with the latest Macbook Pros, the switch to USB-C doesn't bother me, the low number of ports does.
I guess it's not something enough people would care about, but it seems like at least one company would have done it by now.
The article is spot on, no-one is served by this change, except manufacturers.
In fact, it may even be integrated on the SoC, meaning it's still present but with nothing to do. Would need to have a look at some teardown photos to be sure.
In all the previous “radical changes”, they created a “better solution” to a problem. Take the removal of Floppies or CD drives, in both cases, the problem was getting data onto the machine efficiently. In both cases technology moved ahead and created better methods of moving data.
Please correct me if I am wrong here, but I fail to see what problem they really “solved” by removing the audio jack.
The problem solved was encouraging sales of some very expensive wireless earbuds. I really do think it was as simple as that.
Those who want Bluetooth wireless could just as easily have it on a phone with a jack without losing any benefit. They already did.
This means being able to include more/new co-processors, different/better microphone technology, etc, not just thinner.
Only what I've heard from other hardware engineers though, I do not work directly in the space. "Sell headphones," could absolutely be a goal.
I don't know who is pushing for wafer thick phones that are increasingly fragile with shorter battery life.
How does the earpiece and speaker work without a DAC in the device? That's there whether there's a jack or not. :)
But when you have your high-quality headphones on, you can certainly tell the difference between a $0.10 DAC and a $5 DAC, just as you could tell the difference between 8-bit and 16-bit samples or 22kHz and 44kHz sample rate.
To get good sound quality, you need good DAC and audio amplifier chips and well-balanced circuitry around them. That takes space.
If a bloke with a little knowhow and a dremel can do a good job at it so can apple.
If nothing else it proves that the jack removal was not done for space-saving or anything other than business reasons.
However whilst I'm prepared to think ill of Apple under pretty much any circumstance - I'm utterly clueless why so many other vendors jumped in (as they don't have Beats to schill). Still convinced I'm missing something clutches onto OG Pixel
I have more faith in Apple manufacturing ability.
There are real use cases which aren't supported, but it seems like they come from a vocal minority. And I'm not sure we should be solving these use cases with a (largely) single use port that takes up a noticeable amount of space.
Phones used to ship with IR blasters, but that doesn't really happen any more, and if you want that, you get an adapter.
Maybe I'll change my tune if my adapter breaks regularly, but I needed to replace my cheap wired headphones semi-regularly already.
My experience with my last phone, where the audio jack started losing a connection if I bumped the jack, or tried to reposition the wire also makes me look more fondly on the idea of wireless headphones, since I'm aware that the jack is not perfect tech either.
And in any case, there are still manufacturers making phones with headphone jacks, so vote with your wallet! It is sad that phones are these bundles of tech and you can't just order a phone with a headphone jack, but if this is really a deciding feature, people should definitely vote with their wallet here!
The thinnest iPhone ever was the 6s, which had a headphone jack so that doesn't hold water.
The only justification that I know that works out is that by removing the headphone jack you do free up a bunch of space inside the phone, which can be used for more electronics or battery.
I have 2 really nice pairs of bluetooth headphones, and almost NEVER use them. Guess what pair gets used almost daily? my 15 year old beyerdynamic DT770s. 3.5mm or ¼" plug, closed back. Not really the most accurate, but a nice bass heavy rich sound and plenty loud. they work with gear that is 50 years old and brand new(so long as they include a headphone jack). I have vintage analog synthesizers 80s and 90s samplers to <2 year old digital synths. All work with these headphones.
Apple really really really really really really screwed up here. reverse course immediately.
Outside some niche uses, digital video really does make general sense. I hear and often agree with analog arguments. I keep analog gear, and in my own hardware projects will stay analog, perhaps also having digital, depending.
But, overall? People largely benefit more from digital video, and with the loss of the CRT, adoption makes sense. Digital only gear makes sense. I have no concerns and can easily use an analog adapter in a pinch.
With audio, it is inverted! A few niche uses benefit, most do not. They are equal or very modest gain at best.
Video gear seems to age out more quickly too. Increases in resolution drive all that, and analog limits do too. Above HDTV 1920x1080, analog has real issues.
Analog audio does not have those dynamics. There is no analog cliff to drive digital gear. Great stuff from the 70's remains entirely relevant. It always will. Ears are just not like eyes.
I will never, ever buy something that only delivers audio digitally.
I think you are right about the DRM.
It will prove to be a waste of time. Audio is too easy. Seriously.
Heck, I can make something to just write the stream to a file, and doing that is not hard. Costs less than a CD.
Not so easy if the analog signal only emerges at the earpiece ...
This analog hole is a ridiculously easy hack job with a soldering iron.
"Ridiculously Easy"? - I wouldn't go that far, but very much within the realms of possibility for a determined attacker I'd say.
But down the line .. as actual physical countermeasures become more sophisticated maybe not so.
That's pretty much a policy. If I pay for it, fine. But I have it in generally useful form. No lock-in. Or I don't buy it.
And I don't mind hacking to get it in general useful form. Easy peasy.
To me, a bit of work, perhaps gain a new skill?
Not only easy, but fun, cheap, all that.
What is hard is having to spend or do work just because of a business model. I really dislike all of that. It is visceral.
Then the fiction we all read about illegal implants will be reality.
I went online to get some help with what was revealed to be the infamous touch-ic issues, and I was told off in so many ways ("that's an old model, you should really get the new one", "if you get flexion based damage, you are using your phone wrong", "wow, another bend-gater. Stop bending your damn phone!").
This was after internal apple documents showed that they were aware of flexion damage before the phone was released to market.
I can see why someone who's never used wired earbuds wouldn't care one way or another, but I really don't understand this sort of attachment.
This, at least, doesn't hold at all. My last flip-phone [0] was water-resistant and still had a headphone jack - it just had a rubber cover you had to pull up to reveal it. The charging port was also protected by the same cover.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/reviews/samsung-rugby-sgh-a837-review/
Works great.
If I were a company, I doubt I’d change course immediately unless the larger data set said something significantly in the other direction. As developers are still, even with our more frequent “upgrade” cycle, not the largest piece of the pie.
How does removing the headphone benefit users? Also how does being a developer affect how one would listen to music on a phone?
The only thing that being developer hints at here is often that group is often more techie and either would be on wireless or have very strong opinions about their listening setup. But the same is likely true for audiophiles (likely skewing toward the 3.5mm).
For what it’s worth, I’m not arguing for the jack to be gone - just sharing the reception I’ve seen in my network.
The headphone jack issue just seems like a solution in search of a problem. No one was complaining about headphone jacks before, so in a very best case scenario there is no positive impact (you already have bluetooth headphones, you don't mind dongles, etc), but in a worst case scenario they made life measurably worse for users (you don't own bluetooth headphones, you don't want to have to deal with dongles, EarPods are super expensive for headphones; all of these are issues which disproportionately affect the less well-off of people who can't afford the headphone upgrades, which techies tend to not be).
Agreed, removing it doesn't seem like it really gained anything. It was neutral at best and likely negative on the average, perhaps my smaller network that has discussed it just isn't negative and decided to not say anything at all.
Anecdotally, the headphone jack loss negatively impacted 100% of the non-developerd I've talked to about it. Now, I recognize the particular skew to that experience that biases it to a negative impact—most of the people I've talked to about it happened to be ballroom dance instructors or students in a ballroom teacher training program at a studio where the routine was to plug your device in to the sound system via 1/8” plug (neither keeping the adapter permanently on the phone or on the studio sound system was a viable solution for any of them, so it was one more thing to forget, misplace, etc.)
But I suspect your 100% is also skewed. Anecdotal experience usually is.
Yeah, it's petty. But literally no one benefits from the absence of jack (or at least no user), so why inflict even a petty annoyance on some users with nothing gained for it?
The real annoyance for me isn’t the lack of the jack, it’s that they haven’t also replaced the jack on the MacBook line yet.
I’m typing this out on my iPhone 6 (which I will keep until it disintegrates because of its headphone jack) and it is plenty thin. I think only Apple themselves are obsessed with thin devices.
Neither seems insurmountable, but if you want to try and remove as many obstacles as possible in the search of those two things then the headphone jack is apparently one of the simpler ones.
Speakers, camera lens, physical buttons, charging, and data transfer are the remaining ones I can think of, and many of those have already been replaced in some models.
I think the headphone jack is a very practical component of the phone, and miss it regularly, but removing it does remove a few limitations on the designer.
At some point, in perhaps the not too distant future, I wouldn't be surprised if phones had been reduced down to look like not much more than a piece of glass. Maybe even a piece of flexible glass!
That's definitely been the trend for a while now, and things like edge to edge screens and wireless charging move us further in that direction. Thankfully neither of those seem to have necessitated the removal of some other function. There have been other casualties other on this path to simplification, such as the removal of the physical home button, but I don't think any which leave as big a gap as the headphone jack.
In my home office, I have it wired to my simple mixer and amp with which two other computers also connect to. And from that split into my speakers and a pair of headset.
All non-digital and no USB involved with other things that can go wrong. I am no Hi-Fi buff, I just like one volume and power button when I need to silence or amp things.
Whilst commuting on the train I also use the headphone jack, even though I also have a Bluetooth headset, but it is limited to two sources which are already used up by my iPad and phone.
I don't want to yet again swear internally whilst standing on a busy tube with 1000 other people with Bluetooth devices, and having to reset the pairing on my iPad/iPhone.
Ps. I have an old phone with a 3.5mm jack, but I never use it. I use audio on my phone only when commuting or walking and then use Bluetooth. But my old iPad and MBP are stationary so I only use 3.5mm devices with them.
My wife also brought Lightning headphones, which didn't work with anything except her phone, leading to her using the cheap airline ear buds for the in flight entertainment system.
For example, https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00E5AHZYA
Except people often use same headphone with both - phone and pc, so you will have to remove the adapter anyway.
I’ve been using a pair of beats for over a year now, and have never run out of batteries with them, even on multi-leg long haul flights. I use them constantly, and almost exclusively charge them when I have to go to a meeting, which doesn’t usually happen more than once a day. I used AirPods before then and their battery life was even better.
No need for a phone that requires an adapter. There are great phones that drive all audio gear nicely.
Those phones will win in the market too.
Cost / benefit ratio is more favorable. Has been, will continue to be, and that will be true because digital audio does nothing new.
Video does! We have great reasons for DV.
Those do not apply to audio. Ears are not like eyes.
Why do you say they'll win?
With video, there's a lot of those. And today in the market we have a mix of analog and digital, mostly digital, and it mostly makes sense.
That isn't really true of audio. And it's not true because audio works very differently.
No pressure.
Again? Samsung "dropped" the headphone jack once already and then decided to reintroduce it in their current line of phones. At least that is my understanding of their products with the S7/S8 having removed the headphone jack and the S9 once again featuring a headphone jack.
I said it in my comment(s) above.
Video, for example, works differently than audio does. Digital video brings advantages that generally outweigh costs in the majority of use cases. Analog video, like audio, does take fewer resources and can still be indicated for projects, depending.
For ordinary consumers, DV is a general win. They will move willingly and their older gear will age out and become not so useful.
DA is not a general win. Their gear will not age out, will not become less useful, etc... Unless that is artificial!
And that is exactly why "no headphone jack" is so contentious right now! Most forced migrations make sense. This one really doesn't, and it's due to the nature of audio, existing gear investments, and the fact that going digital really doesn't get a person anything new.
Above that we've got some real spiffy bits. No wires is probably the best of the lot. That's a win, but the cost of it, when one is forced to adopt only a digital path is much higher than it needs to be and everyone knows it.
Should the entire electronics industry abandon analog audio, there will be startups who embrace it. 70's era gear remains entirely relevant. And it will, again, unless forced artificially.
70's era video is marginally relevant. NTSC / PAL at SD resolutions, and on analog gear, have a few sweet spots left, but for almost everyone, using that gear does not make too much sense today.
This is absolutely HUGE.
Put another way, the winners from "no headphone jack" are largely the people not wanting to include a headphone jack. Ordinary people can get all the spiffy stuff and abandon analog as they see fit without ever being required to do or spend on things having basically no value.
I don't get anything new, and my personal cost and risk exposure related to audio goes up! And this is true for very large numbers of people.
That's a losing proposition.
I just happened to think of a great parallel: HD Radio. It's got some nice advantages, but basically does nothing new, and it does so at a very significant cost to everyone.
Said that one would fail, and it basically has. Nobody needs digital radio, and what they failed to understand was that (due to commercials and other annoyances already impacting radio), and how people use radios, and the value of the installed base of radios out there now.
Right now, if you get one of those expensive radios, there are literally give away stations, no commercials! That's how poorly the dynamics surrounding radio are understood by the bigger players. They can't give it away!
I know I would not take a free phone, sans the jack. It's way too much of a hassle to be outside a production proven, time tested, high value, audio ecosystem.
These are all reasons why people who don't really get how their customers do things are going to lose in the marketplace.
Heck, I have not even read a single reason why it has to be done!
Big content wants it, because piracy. (laughable at this point, and that's no joke)
Apple wants it, Google probably wants it, because friendly to big content, also up selling, accessory replacement selling.
Samsung shows us it's entirely possible to make an awesome phone with the jack in it. I own one, and it is actually an awesome phone. Apple has nothing on my Note 8. (But I do love Apple's approach to user data security / privacy.)
There just isn't any value added here. Worse, the cost "savings" from removing the jack is what? $50 bucks tops?
How much do adapters, new earbuds, and related bits cost over the life of the phone? What about a person's time, existing knowledge, investments in gear?
Losing proposition across the board. Again, that's why I do not see a win on this.
No, no, no. Can we please get rid of this adapter hell? It's awful and just way too much overhead. In every situation. No matter if phone or laptop
Not anymore
https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/12/17827970/no-more-free-iph...
To paraphrase some marketing slogans from the days of yore:
IBM said "Think" [2]
Apple said "Think different" [3]
I say "Think wisely"
[1] https://wiki.lineageos.org/devices/whyred
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_(IBM)
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_different
I honestly don't care if I have a "headphone jack": I totally agree with Apple that it was a shitty jack. It was a fragile hole that made it impossible to waterproof the damned phone. How about they just give me two lightning ports? Or a lightning port and a USB-C port, to make my dreams finally come true of only having to carry around one (USB-C) cable while still getting to be compatible with all of the stuff Apple already sold for these devices?
This works great, until...
You leave the pair of headphones with the dongle behind by mistake and spend the rest of the day frustrated because you have access to a perfectly good pair of headphones but no the dongle.
Or you stick to one primary pair of headphones and are frequently taking the dongle on and off making it even easier to misplace or leave behind.
It's frustrating to have to come up with solutions, however effective, to problems that should never have existed in the first place.
I'm willing to make that trade, especially given how uncommon DVD's were even by the time the MBA launched. (Although I'll note that my desktop has a BluRay drive and I wouldn't have it any other way.)
What benefit am I getting in exchange for the loss of a headphone jack? An extra couple millimeters of screen real estate?
This is all such an unnecessary problem.
Wireless things suck, I've never considered bluetooth for anything and I really, really hate my bluetooth keyboards. They have nice keys and petite builds, but I haven't used any of them for years now (one Apple, another also with great build). Can't be bothered for batteries, can't be bothered with bluetooth for different linux distros, desktop environments etc. Habits with technology are easily broken even when we don't want to. Give me wired or I'll go without. Also, Wi-Fi internet at home just sucks (IoT/SmartHome I won't even go into, much less that joke called SmartTV [give me regular TVs back please that don't look after me in goody two shoe or shady ways]). Whoever thought Wi-Fi everywhere was a good idea? Reach sucks, gives everyone on the block cancer. Let's stop spamming waves around people. They're not not noise, even if not perceived (microwaves for instance make me want to leap out of the room, it's like a screeching feeling.) I wish ethernet cables were still something people regularly setup, really wish.
I used not to hate technology, really did. Then the executives overdid it and the Wozniaks were put out on the side.
I don't want to second-guess you, but that sounds more like a high-frequency sound from the microwave mechanism than anything directly caused by microwave radiation. Can you hear the "mosquito sound"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKl_sTh0oHE
Carry my phone in my backpack now, and moved my bed.
Now I just have that smart meter... that one soaks the entire house in a steady whine.
The house electrical system emits radio waves, and so do most screens, many lightbulbs, any device with an electric motor (e.g. hairdryers)..
And of course, your house is bathed by radio and TV station broadcasts, cellphone towers, CB radios, and of course, millions of space objects. Like the Sun.
Ah that would be the flyback transformer. Plainly audible to us these days now that most TVs don't have them any more. (I think GP is talking about something else btw)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flyback_transformer
It's really good; as I was reading it I would stop and check the date it was authored. It holds up very well.
It took a new local library opening up, and a holiday, for me to finally get to Snow Crash. I suspect I might be reading a few more of his works very soon.
I don't think I've read any of the others, though I may have started Seveneves at some point, but I did read "The rise and fall of D.O.D.O." (just before Snow Crash in fact!) which I highly highly recommend as well.
Well, it could be simpler, and more of a free market, if you could choose your OS across different brands instead of also having to change that, or if you didn't lose access to everything you have already bought for one OS's app marketplace.
There are plenty of things being done by the vendors in this space specifically to combat the effectiveness of the free market, because the free market is good for consumers and bad for short term company profits. Captive consumers are all the rage in the 2000's.
Actually, I pick old Palm. I'll buy a new Palm Treo like I did 10 years ago and it was glorious old tech. Maybe no whatsapp is a plus and I'll just use from the laptop, tell people to call/sms me during the day.
Fact of the matter is, while nearly every single obnoxious facet of the tech world can be worked around, half the people in my family can't figure out how to turn their phone's wifi on and off, let alone something as complex as replacing the entire OS and figuring out solutions to the various bugs this might introduce.
For an absolutely enormous majority of the population, your choices are something that doesn't care about UX anymore and comes in three flavors of "really expensive" or something that harvests your personal data all day long.
As a counterpoint, I think wires suck. They get in the way, they get tangled, I have to transport them, they break all too often, I trip over them, they knock things over when I move with them, they blow around in the wind, they present a fire risk and a safety risk, they have some kind of physical connection which keeps changing.
Downsides of wireless: remembering to charge, and configuration (a bit annoying if you have multiple devices).
advantages of jacks + wires: reliable, 140 year old industry standard, plug-and-play, universal, cheap, easy to repair, doesn't require battery, doesn't require configuration, doesn't get out of sync, cannot be hacked by a third party.
downsides: sometimes all those wires tend to mix and make knots.
upsides: my very old thingamajig with a broken display doesn't support anything else
My JLab Audio Diego earbuds have lasted for the past two years, and I don't treat them well—they stay in my back pocket, and have experienced several trips through the washing machine.
And if they ever do break, the cost of a replacement is $15. That's barely more than the cost of the headphone jack to lightning adapter that I would need if I upgraded from my 6S.
And they have a flat cord that very rarely gets tangled.
Not sure, but it appears that the bypass around the amplifier (which requires power) is just not designed right.
I looked into this, and the Bluetooth audio codecs just aren't that good. From heated discussions I have learned that the AirPod ones are in fact lossless because they use a grade of codec that isn't commonly available and thus never actually have to decode/reencode or anything like that. It's digital all the way to your ears.
So maybe bluetooth is "as good as" line quality when you've all the pieces lined up; but line quality can be obtained "for free" at all times with commodity hardware. Just a thought.
You mean to say "lossless all the way". Also, it cannot be digital all the way except if you were linking up your aural nerves to the airpod directly. ;)
It's digital all the way to your ears in that you don't need to decode and then reencode, thus eliminating that intermediate "lossy" analogue transition phase. So yeah digital all the way, and by implication "lossless" because of that.
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B0757WVSN8/ref=oh_aui_de...
I guess I can’t charge my phone and use headphones at the same time, but I really couldn’t before either considering the length of the charging cable.
But I guess you must always be charging your phone since the usbport is occupied?
The only place this really makes sense is on a long haul flight when you want to make sure you have fully charged phone and listen to music while falling asleep.
I also have broken or lost over 3 adaptors now. This wasn’t broken and was pretty transparently done to increase the adoption rate of airpods IMO, so it is pretty frustrating. If I hadn’t had mind-blowing-ly bad experiences with samsung phones I would have jumped ship over this.
Thankfully I have a sensible phone, but what's the benefit to me in having a phone that can have sound output or charging but not both?
However, I also really love my bluetooth headphones, and that's what I use when I'm not at my desk at home. They also work as wired headphones, but I acknowledge they are not affordable to most people. A charge lasts a really long time, and they have some nice features as well. I don't expect them to last 15 years, however.
I bought a specific pair of wired earbuds with a mic to use for conference calls using my phone (Android). Now that my phone is failing and I'm forced to upgrade, I'm a bit concerned that the USB-to-3.5mm dongle for the Pixel 3 may not be compatible w/ the mic in my earbuds. In pictures it looks like it has a proper tip-ring-sleeve configuration so it might work, but at this point I'm just crossing my fingers until I can test.
To get lower volume overall with Equalizer APO: install, reboot and change the Preamp line in EqualizerAPO/config/config.txt to -20 dB or whatever suits you. It should work as soon as you save.
any of us still missing those?
needless to say that it kinda sucks when a new device forces you to buy new adapters / peripherals, but in the long run, is this really an issue?
heck even if my laptop comes with a ethernet port, i still couldn't use it at my workplace.
I still miss having a dvd drive every couple of weeks, when I want to watch a video that isn't on a streaming service.
I still miss the serial port when I'm fiddling with bits of hardware (and my old graphing calculator).
Parallel port we're well shot of though.
Anyways, your examples are not exactly the same as this situation. In the cases of removing the floppy drive and CD/DVD drives, it was upgrading one technology for another which was able to hold more data, was a more stable medium than the predecessor, and was generally more reliable. The 3.5mm->bluetooth was not an upgrade in stability or reliability, and the ethernet->wifi change was not an upgrade in anything except 'mobility' (but systems with ethernet jacks at that time typically had wifi too, so, again, it was a general downgrade in functionality).
Back in the day serial and parallel were very useful for interfacing to real world machines. Now everyone uses a simple linux board like an rpi, but in the interim it was seriously inconvenient to interface. USB1 is absolute rubbish, USB2 not much better.
In the case of the ports you've mentioned, there were other improved connections to move towards. The blutooth headphone is not improved over the 3.5mm cable unless you are so vehemently opposed to the idea of a cable that you would live with its shortcomings. Market leaders like Apple and Samsung have made investments into this market (beats, for example), and to try and dominate market share are extorting their users into buying extraneous, disposable accessories that aren't an objective improvement of existing standards, all while parading the recycled content of their latest 128gb dual core laptops.
Unless 3.5mm headphone jacks will be around in 50 years who knows.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/apple-iphone-headphone-ja...
Especially for audio connectors, i don't think it is a coincidence that the 3.5mm jacks and its fatter brother have not changed since forever. people wanted to use it with their older stuff.
Hell, OnePlus ran a campaign eight months ago laughing about others removing the headphone jack, only to remove it six months later on the 6T.
I bought the OnePlus 6 because I wanted a good phone with a close-to-stock OS and a headphone jack. Nowadays, I think you'll struggle to get both, and I think that we're one manufacturer away (Samsung) away from the market joining Apple and Google in getting rid of the jack.
I'll support it for as long as I can, because I use the jack every single day, but I fear that in three years time the high-end market will have left us behind.
I guess everyone else streams their radio these days.
I could stream the local radio station, sure, but that's a fair whack of data just doesn't need to clog up my internets / quota.
I think we've all benefitted somewhat from this attitude, even if it was inconvenient.
The distinction here is that the 3.5mm standard isn't/wasn't a computer peripheral standard. It is/was an audio industry standard. There are many uses for 3.5mm that have nothing to do with phones/tablets/laptops/desktops.
Additionally, the audio industry has a different obsolescence timeline than computer equipment. Audiophile and pro audio headphones (for example) represent a significant investment and are intended to last many years.
In my view, Apple's approach to this was a kind of chauvinistic hubris. No, I don't want to use a $15 adapter of dubious quality on my $1500 custom molded in-ear monitors. No, I can't just get a new pair. No, I can't re-sell them, they only fit my ears. No, they wouldn't sound the same even if a bluetooth version were to become available. No, I doubt the 4 person company that makes them is eager to try to figure out how to make a lightning version, even if they have the in-house expertise.
The decision really shows a lack of understanding of the world outside of computer manufacturing, and it is too bad others followed suit.
“Easy”.
You can get great Android devices with headphone jacks.
I like some Mac computers a lot. Happy customer. 2012 Mac Book Pro is a sweeet machine! Has all the ports, is plenty fast, sexy. No, I don't run iTunes and friends.
Today, I will run most anything on a computer. I don't mind Android. There are open alternatives all over the place and I use them, moving from platform to platform with relative ease. This all gets easier over time. I can even dumpster dive and get up, running and make some quick cash.
Android is a reasonable, general purpose computer when I want one on the go. Programming, terminal? Check. Content create? Check. Comms of all kinds? Check. Heck, I can through a VM on my Samsung and actually do stuff using the pen. Amazing. If I choose to carry bluetooth keyboard / pad combo, it's happy to show me a pointer and I'm off to the races! And device support? That phone will operate a portable, USB floppy drive, if I need it.
Apple has nothing at all on that environment.
The pads? Throwaways, got one given to me, and it's a great toddler learning tool. Throwaway app buys. I won't ever take the thing seriously, though Mrs loves to stream on it.
As for attached... Nice phone, what's that thing sticking out of it like that... Seriously. Honestly, if it were me stuck with that, I would try and find a case with the jack built in.
And here's the thing! You got that choice forced on you. it's completely unnecessary. Forced migrations happen sometimes. That's OK. This one is unnecessary. There is no meaningful gain, and quite a few downsides to digital only audio delivery.
Finally, yeah. Easy. Only hurts the first time. Rip that bandaid. No joke! Just start. Lots of help out there, and you will benefit over the longer haul.
Once you do, and start navigating away from that lock in, it all improves nicely. I've helped a few people do that. They get there. Soon, they are showing me cool things they found out there in the wild.
I'm sure the millions of happy iPad owners would be thrilled to hear you categorize the device as a toddler learning tool.
I'm completely bewildered by your position that a lightning-to-audio-jack dongle is somehow a big deal, given that when it's plugged in it's virtually indistinguishable from the cable you would have plugged into an audio jack anyway. The white cord attaching my headphones is a full inch and a half longer than it otherwise would be, what a horror!
And finally, I'm no more locked in to the Apple ecosystem than I would be to any other ecosystem—Windows-based or Linux-based—that I switched to, over time. It's irrelevant to me if one platform is "open" if I wouldn't be happy with the software available on that platform. I used Linux as my sole environment for something like fifteen years. Been there, done that, happier on a Mac nowadays.
But thanks for your overly-parental concern.
Any happy iPad owners, and I am a happy iPad owner mind you, can and should be perfectly secure in all of that, not concerned at all about how I, again a happy iPad owner, happen to use my iPad. And my primary use case happens to be all the throw away, non-serious use cases.
It's a dongle. It is completely unnecessary. Lots of people do not mind unnecessary encumbrances. One of the more frequently seen scenarios is expression of style.
I am just not one of those people, and I'm gonna pass completely on weak sauce marginalization of so many other great points made, other than I suspect they don't apply in your case, and you are about you. Fair enough.
You and I run about the same on general computing. I run a mix, love Macs that have actual ports on them, the same going for Win 10, 7 and Linux. And I run a mix of open and closed software too. The point being to be happy, while avoiding lock in that could be harmful.
In a pinch, I can drop pretty much any software I use, get the necessary data out of it, and into something else with few worries. That's the open data, open computing, anti-lock in discussion in play. No need to be a purist or zealot.
What that means is this:
I really loved the Mac Book with ports. The current ones? Laughable. Won't recommend, nor purchase. That could change, say when I see some ports again. Or not. Being a happy customer when I can be happy as a customer is my point in all of this exactly.
Apple got me to buy a Mac. Then they fucked way up. I won't buy another one right now, and because I do manage data, software, all that stuff, nothing really lost, other than my business for Apple. Lots of options out there, and I went Lenovo. Good to go. Always will be.
And later, I may well pick up a Dell. Who knows? I'm not locked in, get to evaluate my use cases, product features, and make selections rather freely. And that's what I really like to empower people to do.
Really, I do not need, nor want your thanks. I'll just ignore that bit and stay laser focused on the forced non-choice Apple thinks is better for it's users than it really is for very large numbers of it's users right now. Ideally, Apple cleans that right up, and it's all good.
...until it isn't, which again, is exactly why lock in is to be avoided.
Already helped a few people move off Apple phones and out of that eco-system. Likely to get more. No worries.
Cheers.
what is funny is that apple gave the excuse of wanting to save space getting rid of the audio jack. but my lg v35 has an audio jack and is thinner than and just as nicely designed as the iphone xs. additionally, lg actually has a high end audio dac in the phone, so music on my v35, and the v10 before it, sounds insanely good on my beyerdynamic headphones.
if i were to move to an iphone, apple would want to take these experiences away from me. and for what? pure hubris predicated on the business plan to sell more accessories like dongles and headphones mascaraed as design courage.
This is basically an arrogant move that can't really be technically justified. E.g. By arguing that better external options exist - better external cameras also exist, should we get rid of the camera too?
agree about deprecation, but what are the standards that they pushed on to the rest of the industry? i m not knowledgeable on the matter
This I have studio headphones I bought in 1995 that I still use nearly daily (albeit not with my phone). I've replaced the earpads on them at least 5 times.
But for very good audio I use my normal sennheisers
I'm honestly not surprised by this. Headphone technology hasn't really changed for many decades. A good pair of cans made a very long time ago are probably still a good pair of cans. I have some Audio Technica woodies that I absolutely love and are still going strong after more than a decade. To Apple and Google, this is a state of affairs that cannot be allowed to stand! Where's the planned obsolescence and constant product turnover? Apple tried to make their earbuds a disposable commodity that need to be replaced frequently, but people caught onto the fact that it was just due to bad build quality and kept buying stuff from other companies. So, change up the connectors and force wireless standards that are, quite frankly, not that good for audio and ripe for eventual upgrade (i.e. bluetooth) into headphones so people won't be able to use the same pair for decades. Profit!
So what should consumers do if they like their current headphones or just don't want to deal with adapters, charging bluetooth devices, or sorting out multiple incompatible connectors? Buy phones that still have headphone jacks, like the Samsung S9.
At the time I was working at home, and had an old set of Sennheiser headphones with a 3m long cable that I usually used for music. Occasionally I'd end up tangled up in the cable, all attempts to prevent it failed. For calls I had a cheap Sennheiser headset which did the trick, and did (what I thought was) a pretty decent job of blocking out noise when travelling.
Earlier this year I went back to the office, and needed some noise cancelling headphones, so got Sony MDR-1000X which are Bluetooth. The noise cancelling really puts the old headset I had to shame, when on an aircraft if I play light music I literally can't hear any outside noise. They are comfortable to wear all the time (a few times in summer my ears did get a bit sweaty) and I usually charge them once or a maximum twice a week, even though I'm using them most of the day. When they say they are low I still get a few hours usage, so just put them on charge at lunch when it first warns me.
Compared to my old headphones the noise quality is about the same, but these have built in volume and track controls, and a microphone. Bluetooth just works for me, and the range is not a problem. I can easily have my phone on one side of my apartment, and listen to music on the other. I have them paired with my phone and computer, and can easily switch the source without major issues. It just works (apart from some weird Linux bug where it uses the wrong audio profile, but on other OSes it's fine).
A few months ago I got a new phone and it didn't come with an audio jack. I tried to find one that did, but this had the best specs for what I wanted, so it was a sacrifice I would have to make. The phone come with a dongle, but I haven't even removed it from the packaging in the box. I just haven't needed it, and don't care that it's gone.
Same thing on my laptop, it has an audio jack (output only) but I don't care if it's removed as I never use it now. On my PC I had to buy a cheapo USB sound card as the built in audio jack had lots of static, so I don't really care if that's removed either.
Bluetooth is good enough, it's just going to be a while until a $15 set of Bluetooth earphones are at a similar quality level to a $15 set of wired earphones. I do agree the execution could have been done better by Apple (e.g. lightning headphones, which you can't use on all Apple hardware) and it was possibly a bit premature, but eventually we would have reached this point.
As for the so called audiophiles who need it, wouldn't you be better off with an external soundcard, rather than relying on whatever $0.50 chip the manufacturer can find?
It doesn't matter if someone else accepts being treated that way, or didn't quite catch what is going on.
I also don't like how the general shift to selling experiences and status symbols instead of tools. The sheer inability to leave people alone and in peace with what works for them, just because it some marketing people have an idea how to get them to "engage" some more and buy more stuff. For example it's kinda nuts that laptops and smartphones are advertised with how thing they are, they're thin enough either way. In a context of humanity hardly even beginning to address the problems our consumerism caused, this is all just lethal circus. All that went on before the removal of the headphone jack, but that is part of it.
Since the Iraq war I avoid flying when I can, even before climate change became scary real, of course I'll avoid products of companies whose attitudes are incompatible with a rational marketplace. Because either that will end, or humanity will end. Just like I don't rely on a $0.50 chip, I don't rely on the "ideas" of equivalent thinkers, or the "awareness" of the mass of people.
> this had the best specs for what I wanted, so it was a sacrifice I would have to make
Well, to me that is entirely backwards. Customers are looking for something, but are denied that thing because companies have other "visions" for them. People find the story interesting and it garners a lot of votes quickly, so it is dropped to the second page just like that... Nothing spells "courage" like that kind of stuff. I just checked, just in the time it took me to write this it dropped from the middle of the second to the third page, but still managed to garner more votes. If the companies treat their fanbases as children and they end up acting like this on their behalf, flagging and downvoting what they don't want to hear, and/or if the companies themselves fuck with online discussions and the consumers look the other way, I'm against it by default either way, before we could possibly get to any technical details.
In short, there is a difference between a good reason for something, and a rationalization of something that was pushed onto you. Yes, I also use an external soundcard and like wireless headphones, but not for mobile devices, and the discussion isn't about "why did most people buy devices withouth headphone jacks once those became available too", this is about things being pushed unilaterally, for sheer profit.
I don't think that is really fair. If I really needed a headphone jack, I could have got a new phone with one, but one of my requirements which was more important than a headphone jack was price, so it was a trade off I was happy to make. Maybe if you want to stay in the Apple ecosystem you are out of luck, but this is the sort of thing Apple has always done (floppy drive, optical drive, soldered ram, battery). If you want to stick with their ecosystem, you should be willing to follow whatever they decide is best - it should be expected from them. You could argue it is wrong, but from a financial perspective it is most definitely working, and many people are still willing to support them.
On a similar note earlier this year I switched (around the same time as I got the Bluetooth headphones) from an Apple laptop to a Thinkpad laptop. I couldn't justify the price increases and limitations Apple has put in-place in a quest for thinness, and the way MacOS seems to be heading. For nearly half the price of a new Macbook Air (the previous gen), I got a new machine which is more powerful, has better battery life, has more ports, is smaller (in area, not thickness) and lighter. For the work I do, Linux provides a much more friendly developer environment than MacOS.
(For me this post is still #6 on the front page)
> You could argue it is wrong, but from a financial perspective it is most definitely working
By that point you're arguing squarely on behalf of the bank account of the company, the customer is completely removed. They are just someone who "should be willing to follow whatever they decide is best", even if it's just best for the company profits, which in the case of Apple they kinda hoard.
> many people are still willing to support them
If that makes my opinion invalid, by the same token my opinion makes theirs invalid. Since I have my opinion, the fact that people assume the position as a helpless consumer, rather than a equal in a fair transaction, be it with Apple or others, is the problem, not the solution.
> (For me this post is still #6 on the front page)
Yes, that was shortly after my comment, but before that it dropped really quickly, down to page 3.
I swear, these things are so easy to misplace.
Right off the bat, in the first paragraph, with an unnecessary political statement. Turns off half the audience right there. Everything said thereafter is taken with a giant grain of salt.
Is this person living in such a bubble that he can't have a conversation without mentioning Trump?
If they were concerned about space and waterproofing, could they have just made a magsafe lightning port instead of a hole taking that amount of space at the bottom?